A newly formed British elite team is searching for £50,000 in sponsorship to enable its riders to pursue goals in European competition.
Raptor Factory Racing, a squad based in south London, has provided spots to Rowan Baker, Dylan Hicks and Bradley Symonds, all formerly of Saint Piran, after their former team closed in the autumn last year.
The team will target a range of major National A and B races domestically and are also setting their sights on several races on the continent. Raptor are backed by the Putney based start up bike brand with the same name but lacks significant sponsorship from elsewhere.
Team boss David Streule told Cycling Weekly that he felt full of enthusiasm for the project after being inundated with rider applications, but said the team needs big investment to help them push on in 2025.
He said: “There’s several trips abroad we’d love to do, but they’re really dependent on finding a bit more money. I don’t want to over promise and under deliver, I realise that to do that requires a big sponsor and money. We’ve seen other teams try and do it on peanuts, and it doesn’t work. It just pisses people off.”
“If somebody came to us with 50 grand, I’d put their name on the jersey,” he added. “I’d give them part-naming rights of the team. That would be enough to allow us to do probably five international trips this year.”
(Image credit: Raptor Bikes)
Streule explained that the project started off at quite a low key level but the situation changed when Saint Piran and Trinity Racing closed down.
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“Suddenly we’ve got all these riders available and this just ballooned into something bigger and better than we ever hoped or believed it could be,” he said. “I think my concern is that I’ve now got all of these good riders, but we just don’t have massive resources to give them the race program that they deserve. That’s why any contributions of funding, any small sponsors, are very gratefully received.”
Multiple WorldTour riders previously spent time at both Saint Piran and Trinity. EF Education-EasyPost’s Jack Rootkin-Gray spent more than a year with Saint Piran, and riders including Tom Pidcock, Ben Healy, Thomas Gloag and Luke Lamperti all previously competed for Trinity.
With time, Streule said that he hopes his project can move to become a new staging post for the WorldTour stars of tomorrow to ride in the UK and begin their careers. Given the team’s past history, he also expressed his frustration that the likes of Trinity were unable to get support from higher up the pyramid moving into the new year.
He said: “This is effectively a new Trinity or Saint Piran that we’re hoping to develop, and that’s effectively a development team for one of the bigger pro teams. The amount of money it would cost to allow me to do a slightly better race program than we currently are able to commit to is not very much at all.
“It just makes no sense that there’s all these promising riders in the UK with nowhere to go and with no help.”
“It just feels to me that someone like Ineos, who are instead giving their money to some German Conti team or whatever as their development team, I just don’t understand why they couldn’t come to some sort of agreement with Trinity and help fund Trinity,” he added.
