Nils Pollitt welcomed the new additions to Bora-Hansgrohe for 2022, saying the team is "well prepared" for the classic despite losing Peter Sagan and Daniel Oss over the winter.

Pollitt, who finished second in Paris-Roubaix in 2019 and fifth in the Tour de Flanders the same spring, will be the team's main leader for the Classic after Sagan moved to Total Energy after five years with the German team.

The 27-year-old German welcomed the 2022 transfers of Marco Haller, Sam Bennett, Danny Van Poppel, and Ryan Mullen, noting that they could contribute in the March and April Classics.

"I think we have a strong team. I think we are ready for the Classic," Pollitt said at a virtual press conference earlier this week.

"Certainly Peter Sagan, Daniel Oss, and Matej Bodnar have left, but now we have Marco Haller, who was already racing with us in Katusha. And then there is Lucas Pestlberger and a new one, Danny van Poppel, who is always in the classics. Sam is also playing well at Gent-Wevelgem. Ryan Mullen is another really strong guy."

Bennett and van Poppel both finished in the top five at last spring's semi-classic, Scheldeprij, and Haller and Mullen have been racing regularly through the spring as team leader domestiques.

Pollitt, who won three of his four career victories last year, said 2021 was by far the best year of his career so far. He won a stage solo from a breakaway group in Nimes at the Tour de France, and a month later he won a stage and the overall at his home race, the Deutschland Tour.

He also failed to finish the rain-affected Paris-Roubaix, the final race of the season, which was his biggest disappointment of the year, but added that he will return again this spring with the northern hell on his mind.

"Definitely my best season," Pollitt said. 'I had a good 2019, but 2021 was much better. I won a stage in the Tour, I won the overall in the German Tour, and I had a lot of good results.

"One big thing was missing and that was Paris-Roubaix, where I had bad luck. I was a little sick before that and it was not my day.

He said he had a good off-season after that disappointment, adding that he was looking forward to returning to racing next week in the Mallorca Challenge, a five-race series. After that, a very standard spring program will begin, including the Classics.

"Usually the program is pretty much the same as in previous years. We go from the Algarve to the opening weekend, Paris - Nice, San Remo, and then the Classics again.

"That's certainly the goal. It's always difficult. It's not like the Tour de France, where you get to tackle 21 stages; it's only five races. But I'm very motivated and I'm definitely going for it."