Last season, Visma-Lease a Bike made waves by announcing a project they dubbed the 'control room' - a mobile data centre designed to analyse live time race action to help inform the team's tactical decisions. Not even a year later, the team has abandoned the concept.
The idea was more of a PR stunt than innovation, and was launched in collaboration with the team's sponsor BetCity. The team only made use of "publicly available information", the Visma-Lease a Bike head of performance Mathieu Heijboer told Cyclingnews last year.
"What we really do not do, and really to emphasise that, is we do not capture anything from the bike, because it's illegal, we play according to the rules," Heijboer said. "The only thing we can do is use TV images and use everything that's publicly available."
The project still raised the suspicions of the UCI, who quickly launched an investigation to determine if the team was "compliant with the regulatory framework in force, notably regarding the capture and transmission of data".
The control room was used during the Tour de France, and the team said it helped them determine if other teams were racing aggressively or defensively.
However, on Saturday, Heijboer told the Belgian media the team had done away with the idea.
"The bus will disappear," Heijboer said. "During this winter period, we evaluated the project. One of the conclusions is that the added value of taking a mobile bus is not very great. The Control Room bus will therefore hardly be seen next year, but the project will remain.
"We are going to create a space in our high performance centre in Den Bosch. All the technology is there, we have a good internet connection and we can communicate with the team leader cars."
