The team's general manager Shayne Bannan was speaking following Wednesday's 2013 Tour de France presentation in Paris, explaining that Orica-GreenEdge would be looking to make an impact on the year's biggest race.
"It certainly promises to be a fantastic bike race," said Bannan. "It's probably significantly harder than this year's edition, but it definitely offers a lot of great opportunities for us."
The Australian-registered team came away from their inaugural showing at the Tour this season without a win, and with green jersey-hopeful Matt Goss' essentially robbed of a chance to take on Peter Sagan (Liquigas-Cannondale) when he was docked 30 points for a sprint deviation on Stage 12.
In 2013, the team will be looking to get off to an early ascendency with both sprint stages and a team time trial offering the best opportunities given Orica-GreenEdge's objectives.
"The set-up of the first week suits our ambition of trying to take our first yellow jersey," said Bannan. "We obviously have our eyes on the stage four's team time trial, and it means we will need to be up there from the beginning. Over the course of three weeks, there will be quite a few opportunities to hunt for stage wins and potentially one of the other jerseys for some days."
Of the three Grand Tours in 2012, the Vuelta a España proved to be the team's most-successful with Simon Clarke claiming a stage win en route to the Mountains Classification victory. In May, Goss claimed the team's first Grand Tour stage win when he took out Stage 3 of the Giro d'Italia.
Get The Leadout Newsletter
The latest race content, interviews, features, reviews and expert buying guides, direct to your inbox!
"I definitely think we are growing into a team that's ready to take on the Tour at a high level," Bannan explained. "This year has been a steep learning curve, but our results during the entire season and the experience that we have gathered this year give us a lot of optimism for our ambitions at next year's Tour de France."
