Graeme Brown, 36, says he really enjoyed his first year with Drapac and will try to win more races for the team in 2016 after star sprinter Wouter Wippert left the Pro Continental team to join the WorldTour.

"I enjoyed it, I did plenty of hours in an aeroplane though which is a problem with a world wide schedule being based in Australia," Brown told Cyclingnews of his first season with Drapac. "In terms of quality it was as good as all my years as a pro. It was a good year and one that wasn’t stress and relaxing but it was more relaxed."

Brown no longer had a guaranteed schedule as he and his team were relying on wild card entries tor aces, but he says he is really pleased with the size and stature of the races he got to do.

"I was quite surprised as the races we did were just Pro-Continental but they were quite big starting with Tour Down Under. I did Tour of Turkey, which I did with Rabobank, I did Tour of , which I did with Rabobank, and all the races were all big races. Colorado as well..."

Brown also enjoyed that his schedule was less race-orientated and allowed him to discover more training for the first time in his career, away from the busy schedule of pure European racing. 

"For me, I physically felt good as I had fixed periods of time where I could go out training. Originally I didn’t like that, I just liked the idea of racing, probably because the last 14 years it was race, race, race. You only had two real training periods in the year, the Australian summer and European summer. Now I had quite a lot of big blocks with up to a month between races which I found let me recover properly from a race and prepare for the next race. Whereas in Europe you have a race every weekend."

After working with Mark Renshaw, Theo Bos, Oscar Freire and Michael Matthews with the Rabobank team, Drapac signed the veteran Aussie to leadout Wippert and Brenton Jones, and Brown says he thinks he did as best as he could to teach them all he knows and appreciates that both riders listened to him.

"They understand that I do actually know what I am talking about," he said of the two riders. "They don’t question, Wippert started to question but I told him to shut up and follow, but I found with every sprinter that I’ve worked with if they stating making their own decisions then it starts going wrong," he said, adding "With Brenton, he listens to everything I said, never questioning my ideas on how a sprint would go. Finally it worked out for him in the end. I didn’t ride that much with BJ during the year and with Wippy, when he was on, it was good. He’d just follow and when he was really good he never said anything and just followed my wheel and was close to wins."