Tour of Britain Chat: Chris Lawless

In the Best of British classification, Chris Lawless is leading the way .. we spoke to the new Sky rider this morning (stage 3)

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Tour of Britain Chat: Chris Lawless

In the Best of British classification, Chris Lawless is leading the way .. we spoke to the new Sky rider this morning (stage 3)

Chris explained “the first two days have been good as it’s always nice racing on home roads. I’ve not had the results I wanted to though. Being the leading Brit and is nice to have that but there are still a potential five more (four now) sprint days, so we’ll see how it goes”.

A few weeks ago, Chris won a sprint stage in the very competitive Tour de l’Avenir. “That was real nice to get and it’s been a good couple of weeks, what with that and signing for Sky. I am hoping to finish it off well in this race and hopefully get picked for the worlds and see what I can do there.”

Looking at Chris’s results in the Tour of Britain, I asked him to compare the Tour de l’Avenir (Under 23s) to a HC level event like the Tour of Britain. “At the Avenier, we (Team GB) were able to take it up and have quite a bit of control” Chris explained.
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“I’d say we were among the strongest sprint teams in that race, with the Norwegians and the Dutch. But here, we just don’t have the firepower to take it up. We have a very young team and it’s lot harder to stay together because of a lack of experience. We will get better as the week goes on and hopefully we’ll get up there.”

“It can be physical in the sprints but everyone is respectful but it’s just so fast. With British roads, you need to be at the front. Once you are at the front, it is a lot easier to stay there than on European roads which can be wider.”

On the British roads which are not as wide, the race is usually spread across the road and no-one can get through. So the difficult thing is getting to the front. The big teams also know how to stop people getting through. Yesterday, I was sat sixth wheel in our team train and we were trying to have all five riders in front of me but then you need to think about how all six can get through a gap instead of one rider so we’ll take a different approach today.”

Finally, the big news in the week has been his contract with Team Sky. “There is a lot less stress having that now. I can relax a bit and that should help my performances. This race and the worlds are my two biggest targets of the year.”

“I feel Sky will be the best place for me to develop. They will look after me and with Viviani leaving, that may open up a few opportunities and I think it should be good place to develop as a rider.”

Good luck to Chris for the rest of the Tour of Britain

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