ANNECY, FRANCE – Well, my guesses were wildly off the mark. Lance Armstrong announced Thursday that his new team starting next year will be none other than electronics retailer, “What’s your phone number?” Radio Shack. The announcement probably came minutes after I posted the previous post, declaring my best guess for the new team as Amgen (Livestrong/Nike/Apple). Hey, I thought I had all my bases covered: I did some last-minute checking of Lance’s Twitter feed, searched the web, looked under rocks, but what can I say. That’s the secret announcement business. I whipped up the support car above (not quite big enough for a team car), using a French Citroen Picasso as my base. Of course, I hope they will go with the old (pre-’95) logo as shown on the car, instead of the deadly-dull current version. The old one has much more personality. I used the red for Radio Shack and the yellow-gold for Livestrong, although those colors are typically reserved for Spanish teams it seems. Expect the actual team cars, jerseys, etc. to use red, white, and blue and the current logo, dull or not.

Juliet Macur of the New York Times has excellent coverage of the happening, as usual. As Juliet points out, the team has set up a Twitter feed, Facebook page, and website. Lance moved up to third overall after Thursday’s time trial. Alberto Contador won the stage and of course retains the yellow jersey. Expect some breakaways on Friday, but probably no significant changes in the overall rankings until Saturday’s Ventoux stage (that’s the one from my previous post where my avatar/cybernaut Man from B.L.O.G. is dressed in full moon gear because of the moon-like landscape there). I have to go now to crush a certain Amgen support vehicle mockup, unless I can hook up with a towing-auto parts dismantling-indifferent police detective conspiracy ring and turn a tidy profit.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 1:48 am and is filed under Bicycles, Cars, General, Graphic Design, Parody. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.