'Setting the the spark for a new chapter' – After unusual winter, Tom Pidcock is back as Pinarello Q36.5 eye new heights

Tom Pidcock will kick off his own season and kick-start that of his team on Friday as he headlines a seven-man Pinarello-Q36.5 squad at the two-day Vuelta a Murcia.

The British rider finished on the podium at last year’s Vuelta a España in a breakthrough season for himself and his team. As such, expectations for both parties are much higher for the 2026 campaign, with Pidcock set to lead a GC tilt at the team’s debut Tour de France.

The second-division Pro Team have been racing on several fronts since January, but they themselves see Pidcock’s entrance into the fray as the true pull-cord to ignite their season.

“Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team arrives in Murcia ready to race on the front foot – with Tom Pidcock’s debut setting the spark for the season ahead,” reads a press release from the team ahead of Murcia.

“His return to competition provides a major boost to the squad’s ambitions and signals the beginning of a new chapter in what promises to be an intense and attacking campaign.”

Pinarello Q36.5 have yet to win a race in 2026, but hopes Pidcock’s arrival will change that. The punchy parcours plays into the 26-year-old’s hands, with the Alto Virgen del Castillo (1.3km at 7.3%) an obvious launchpad 3.5km from the finish line on stage 1, followed by the Alto Cresta del Gallo (4.4km at 6.6%) 20km from home on a final day that starts with an early category 1 climb.

The main question mark surrounding Pidcock will be how he gets going after a long and unusual winter, and the omens that set the tone for the rest of his campaign.

The former cyclo-cross world champion skipped the CX season entirely and headed not to Sierra Nevada or Tenerife but to the largely untrodden soil of Chile for a long training camp with several key teammates. There were a few off-road escapades, but Pidcock is placing more and more of his eggs in the road basket, and while he will race Omloop Het Nieuwsblad later this month, those eggs are increasingly going into the GC basket.

After his storming start to 2025 – his first season at Q36.5 following his early departure from Ineos Grenadiers – it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Pidcock make an immediate impact once again.

Victory at a mid-level two-day event, which features only six WorldTour teams, would hardly be the biggest achievement of his career, but a GC title is never to be sniffed and, not least for a still-budding GC prospect. Pidcock’s victory at the AlUla Tour last year was the first stage race success of his pro career, and laid the foundations for what was ultimately a dream debut with Q36.5.

That transfer had been seen as a risk. It’s not often you see one of the sport’s brightest stars dropping down to a second-division team, and a relatively new one at that. But Pidcock was brilliant at the start of the 2025 season and broke new ground at the Vuelta at the end of it.

After all the tensions at Ineos, it certainly felt like he’d found an environment in which he could thrive.

His efforts, in turn, lifted the whole team, which had struggled to gain traction in their first few seasons. Now, they have an invite to their first Tour de France, and have attracted an eye-catching string of new signings for 2026, including Quinten Hermans, Eddie Dunbar, Fred Wright, and Sam Bennett.

“It’s another step on the ladder of where we want to get to,” Pidcock said recently of the team’s Tour de France invite. This very much feels like a team consistently eyeing bigger and better things, and Pidcock – a world-class talent with potential still to explore – is very much the beating heart of that.

So while 2026 is already several weeks old, you can see why they see this as the moment their season truly comes to life.