Bas Tietema looks ahead to Tour of Flanders debut with Unibet Rose Rockets: “A top 10 would be amazing”

So far, Unibet Rose Rockets have enjoyed an excellent season. The Dutch-French team already has as many wins in early April as it managed in the whole of 2025. That progress has been driven in part by another step forward in recruitment, with former WorldTour riders such as Elmar Reinders, Wout Poels and, above all, Groenewegen strengthening the roster.

Groenewegen is responsible for four of the team’s five wins this season and looks to have fully rediscovered his sprint form with the Rockets. In the Tour of Bruges, for example, he beat Jasper Philipsen and delivered the team’s first WorldTour win. Sunday now offers the ProTeam another major occasion.

The team, which grew out of the Tour de Tietema YouTube channel, will make its debut in De Ronde this weekend. Tietema is clearly relishing the moment, as he told Cyclingweekly. “I’m really excited, already for years. It’s one of the most crazy races in terms of people. It’s like a national holiday here in Flanders. I think it will be an insane feeling.”

Despite the team’s excellent performances this season, Tietema does not yet want to compare the Rockets with WorldTour outfits. The Dutch article notes that the squad currently sits ahead of teams such as Groupama-FDJ, EF Education-EasyPost and Picnic PostNL on UCI points, but Tietema still keeps that in perspective. “I don’t think it’s fair to compare us with teams that are punching way above our level in terms of budget, but also [in terms of] the depth of their team,” he said. “But I do think that, with a limited fund, and a lot of passion and smart choices, you can be super competitive in certain areas.”

That does not mean the team is lacking ambition for the Tour of Flanders. “We don’t have a Remco [Evenepoel] or a Wout [van Aert] or Tadej Pogačar or Mathieu [van der Poel], so we need to do it in a smart way,” Tietema said. In Dwars door Vlaanderen, the team showed through Niklas Larsen that it can get deep into a major race with an intelligent anticipatory move.

That is also how the Rockets want to chase their goals in Flanders’ biggest race. “In terms of a result, a top 10 would be already insane,” Tietema said. “Therefore we need to see an opportunity during the race to find the right moment to get into the race there… For people to see us riding deep in the final, in the same way as in the first race we started, I think that would be really cool.”