One big car

In my home town it is not uncommon to see cyclists run through stop signs or stop lights. I’m guilty of that on occasion but I try to keep it to a minimum. I’m sure this happens everywhere. That problem is often magnified when in a big group. A big group can hardly go down a road with traffic lights and have the whole group make it through the light. Especially if there are many traffic lights in a short distance.
It is kind of a light hearted joke when we have a big group ride and finish the ride in downtown Sacramento. As we are going through a light and as the tail end is trying to make it before the red light we have a chant. We sort of say this as we often fail to get the whole group through. Basically we say “One Big Car”. We don’t shout it out loud but sort of say it to each other to try to justify the tail end of the group rides failure to pass through before it turns red.
I’d have to honestly say the Postal team is way better than our group rides at home. Their safety is of high priority so running stop signs and traffic lights are not important to them. Careers could be at stake so they are much more careful than you would expect.
Now that our team is at the UCI maximum of 25 riders we are a long train of blue jerseys. Chris and Geoff both went in the cars to follow the team training ride in two separate cars driven by Dirk and Lorenzo respectively. Add those two cars and our team is probably 50 meters long from the front rider to the back two cars.
Because of the size of the group we decided to split the team into two groups on the second day. There is another reason to do this. Some riders need to be fit earlier than others. In a nutshell there is the Classics group which goes at a slightly faster tempo to ramp up their fitness whereas the other group is a bit more tame speed wise because their goals are farther down the road. No pun intended. Both groups do the exact same ride. They just start with a short 10 minute interval between the two. Fast group first and slow group second so they don’t converge on each other. Today Juan and I went in the follow cars. Dirk and Juan followed the Classics group and Lorenzo and I followed the slow group.
This is a really great plan. Now we will really never have to say “one big car”.