1. Poland: Why is it Cat 3? In real world it has the same classification as Romandie, Suisse, P-N, T-A etc. which all are Cat 4s. And now its the same cat as Burgos which imo doesnt make sense.
2. Vuelta: We didnt have a 8h GT edition so far, so it could be an option ofc. but for me as morning/afternoon guy 8h will always be too early, especially for 23days. That means I would be forced to the afternoon, I think this could be the same for other people riding in the morning, but I dont wanna speak for them.
So seeing Hansas suggestions, this would probably kill Vuelta for me having no afternoon GT.
Vuelta in the afternoon last year had more participants than the morning (12 in total), so I think its not that unpopular?. If you think about cutting the afternoon, then the morning should move to 10h at least. Even if the afternoon is not cut, I would prefer at least 9h for a GT. But morning guys feel free to comment here.
I could also live with a 13h edition for the afternoon btw, I kinda like the idea. Benelux and Deutschland currently also only have 1 morning + 1 afternoon option (only Benelux btw), so Im against cutting one of the Vuelta editions there.
3. Tours in general: August has plenty of tours, I mostly feared the need to design so many tours for only 1-2 editions but it looks like that wont be the problem. Easiest would have been to cut some editions, Burgos f.e. - but now its designed and its actually a 2.Pro tour so why not.
5 editions parallel is no problem in my opinion, we had that multiple times (march T-A + P-N etc.) and due to the Tiktok wave we have some more teams playing right now. So for sure not cut an edition here, but add one?
-> Portugal: I do think 2 editions can make sense here, because a 12day tour can be quite interesting for many people + we have a lot of portuguese teams that really wanna ride that tour. But 20h might be too early for them? Its 19h then for them, so maybe just go for 22h again like last year as Alpacas suggested, or 21h.
-> Burgos/Poland: Burgos and Poland both should stick to at least 2 editions, Id even prefered 3 editions for Poland cause I think its more important than the others, see 2.UWT category (and then cut 1 Burgos), but 2-2 is okayish I guess.
If we stick for 8h Burgos, 10h Portugal could make sense cause it attracts some more morning teams I guess, and burgos is only 1 day on the weekend. This would be the only option in my opinion to have 2 parallel morning tours.
-> Czech/Norway: I think 4 editions for them is okay, like Burgos/Poland, its both 2.Pro tours and they are quite short. Not a fan of 11h cause 2 stages would be during the week, which interferes with lunch etc. I think 10h is okay too, or 9h maybe if we go for 10h Portugal and dont wanna double here.
-> Benelux/Deutschland: Tough one, Benelux tour not unimportant (2.UWT) so 3 editions make sense, Deutschland good to include it here as we have lot of german managers and we didnt have it last years it seems. But with Vuelta parallel we cant have 10 editions parallel, especially when it seems like we wont have a big hype/advertising going on at the moment. Even if we cut one Vuelta edition, we shouldnt have 5 tours parallel.
See what happens at TDF this month, we had 2 editions each of Sibiu and Austria (this was maybe a bit too low in flexibility of riding at different times for non tdf teams) but we only had 20 teams in total each riding sibiu and austria. The one day races races had 7-10 teams each on average. If we increase the number of parallel tours by 2 this is already a stretch, I dont see it higher.
I think we def should have the discussion about the amount of vuelta editions first, if we can agree on 4 editions, this would open up some room for the rest of the calendar planning late August.