Lazkano's crazy watts and stage race win records – GCN Racing News Show

We had some pretty big watts to report recently on the GCN Racing News Show, and we’re back this week with some more eye-watering early-season numbers, courtesy of the Spanish road race champion, Oier Lazkano.

The Movistar man took out the Jaén Paraíso Interior, a Spanish one-day race that features gravel sectors, last week, with a long-range solo raid.

It was quite the effort to get away but staying away, and holding off a quality chase group, required some staggering power output, and the numbers we’ve seen mark this out as one of the top performances of the early season. “Absolutely crazy” is how our host, Si Richardson, describes them.

Lazkano’s average power over the 3 hours 44 minutes he took to win the race was 350 watts, which equated to an astonishing normalised power output of 409 watts over that time. In terms of the shorter efforts, there was a peak 20-minute output of 457 watts, and a five-minute peak of 514 watts.

“A few years ago, those numbers would have been impressive at Tour de France, let alone February,” says Si.

Lazkano made his breakthrough with a similarly brutish breakaway effort at last year’s Dwars door Vlaanderen and, having since won the Spanish title and now done this in Jaén, could be a real dark horse at this year’s Spring Classics.

Elsewhere on the Racing News Show, we’re testing your knowledge of the peloton’s most decorated stage racers. That’s because Remco Evenepoel won the Volta ao Algarve at the weekend to seal the 12th general classification title of his career, and only four active pros in the men's peloton have more. Si gives away the first couple before revealing the top two at the end of the show, but can you correctly identify them?

Read more: Remco Evenepoel survives Wout van Aert onslaught and climbing mechanical to win Volta ao Algarve

Si also has an in-depth stage-by-stage round-up from the Volta ao Algarve, as well as the Ruta del Sol, although the latter was a rather easier task given the Spanish race was reduced to just one stage, and 5km, due to farmer strikes in the south of the country.

The racing is coming thick and fast as we go deeper into February, and there’s plenty more to recap, including the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana, which saw a number of the top women’s riders in action, the Tour of Oman, and a weekend of French racing at the Tour des Alpes Maritimes and the Classic Var.

There’s even a bit of cyclo-cross leftover, and a little time left for some odds and ends, including a name change for the Tour de France champion, Jonas Vingegaard – or make that Jonas Vingegaard Hansen.

Check out this week’s GCN Racing News Show above to discover everything you need to know about last week’s big stories.