BMW-Bianchi racks up the wins

It's hard to believe the season is just getting underway.  A look at our results page shows so many top tens that it looks like it should be September!  Many of the wins are coming from the team's newest members - Amy Slater and Lauren Shirock.

Amy joined the team after meeting Patty and Kelly at the Duke Ironman triathlon, and she has shown incredible strength on the bike.  Her competitors have likened her to a Rottweiler because of her ferocity and also her ripped legs!   Amy took 6th in one of her very first road races - in the open field at the Greenville Spring series, then went on to take second in the category 4 criterium in Rock Hill.  The next day, just one month into her road racing career, Amy scored her first win in the Rock Hill road race!

From there, the results just kept coming - 1st in the I'on criterium in Charleston, 1st in Meadowmont, and third in the SC criterium championships.  This earned Amy her category 3 upgrade, and, undaunted, she took the category 3/4 road race in Walnut Grove in typical 'ride the pack off her wheel' fashion.

Junior National Champion Lauren Shirock has done nothing but win so far this year!  She opened her season at the Jefferson Cup with a win in the open race, took out the Tour of Walkerville and Strasbourg Road Race the next week, and more recently won the Tour of Ephrata Road Race and the Bear Mountain Road race - both in front of a quality field.



Liz Griffith is our team's next winningest member, despite having to work 50+ hour weeks!  Liz started off the season with solid results in Tennessee, and then took her first win of the season in the Rock Hill road race where she blasted out of the pack in the bunch sprint and won by many bike lengths.  Liz then went on to win the Dilworth criterium in a similar fashion.

Many people might be unaware that the team also has a very impressive multi-sport component.  Tina Weiler, our NC Time Trial champion, is tearing up the Duathlon circuit, having won the Greensboro winter duathlon, and the Virginia Beach duathlon - which qualified her for the Duathlon World Championships!  She also won the Dismal Dash time trial for good measure.


Kelly McLaughlin has been working steadily towards her goal of ranking in the Elite Triathlon, and won the Tri America long distance event in Florida in monsoon-like conditions, giving her the tough girl award of the year. Kelly also made the podium in the Komen Cycle for the Cure category 3 race.

Equally impressive is the team's NRC racing.  New members Kim Sawyer and Kim Foland, along with Melissa Petty and Ashley Anderson took on the country's best racers in Jacksonville, the Richmond US Open, Athens Twilight and the rest of the Southeast Crit series. 

Read all about the racing in our team diaries section, where Kim details the team's exploits in Beaufort, Roswell, Alabama and more.

While top finishes are hard to come by when faced with this kind of competition, the team did well and Kim Sawyer and Kim Foland both scored top 20 finishes.

The BMW-Bianchi team has grown this year to 21 riders, a team nearly as large as some ProTour men's teams!  It's impressive to see the cyan train rolling along the roads, and with talent like this, the results page will be really long by the end of the year!