In a normal season, the Challenge Mallorca series of races would be on par with any early-season event in a warm country: competitive, yes, but not the most important race in the world, and probably not featuring the very top riders.
This year, however, Mallorca will welcome seven men's WorldTour teams and names including Remco Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz from Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, most of UAE Team Emirates-XRG's potential Tour de France domestiques, and various technical staff and aerodynamicists.
The reason why? Well, that would be Thursday's Trofeo Ses Salines, which instead of being a road race will this year be a 24km team time trial.
Team time trials have been on something of a decline over the last decade, but this year the discipline is going to be more important than ever, as for the first time since 1971, the first stage of the Tour de France will be a TTT. That means the discipline will not only decide the first stage winner and the yellow jersey – two of the most prestigious results of the season – but also the early time gaps, which can be crucial in the first week of the race.
More so than an individual time trial, team time trialing is a discipline that requires a lot of fine-tuning and practice, not only in the equipment, but in the technique, the strategy, the communication. There's so much to get right, and possibly so much to lose if things go wrong.
Despite the opening TTT of the Tour in Barcelona carrying such weight, teams only have two in-race scenarios to practice the discipline: Stage 3 of Paris-Nice in March, and the Trofeo Ses Salines.
With many riders not wanting to add a whole stage race to their programme just to practice the TTT, Mallorca has become the unofficial test event.
My view
In terms of participants, teams field a selection of riders who rotate through the five Challenge Mallorca events, so we're not sure exactly what every line-up will be, but we're expecting Remco Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz to race with Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe putting special effort into this event.
For UAE, their line-up is set to include Nils Politt, Felix Großschartner and Pavel Sivakov – no Tadej Pogačar, but a lot of the possible Tour team, so he'll just have to slot into the line-up come July.
The course itself is 24km, which may seem on the shorter side for a TTT since they used to be very long, but is in line with the modern lengths – the Barcelona TTT will be 19km. The Ses Salines route is flat, whereas the Barcelona route has some climbing in the finale, but the technique, equipment and general practice is more important that subtle route changes when it comes to team time trialing.
Who will win the race on Thursday is almost besides the point – though we'd guess Red Bull and UAE will be the main contenders – but the most important thing is for Tour de France teams to get a serious hit-out in this lesser-practiced discipline - not as a training simulation but an actual race with actual results on the line.
Whatever goes right here will be a good sign for July, and if anything goes wrong, there's still five months for teams to work on it so they arrive in Barcelona honed and ready.
