During the second week of the Giro, which on paper doesn’t look as hard as the first or final week, Pro Continental squads like CCC Sprandi Polkowice are on the hunt for a so far elusive stage win.

“It’s been a very tough first week, too, lots of full-on racing, but we had a rest day yesterday [Monday] and I think we are ready for the next week,” DS Piotr Wadecki told Cyclingnews.

“Normally we try for the breaks and look for our chance from there. We don’t have a sprinter, we don’t have a rider who can beat [Fabio] Aru (Astana) and [Alberto] Contador (Tinkoff-Saxo) in the climbs so that’s our way to winning the stage.”

Today’s hilly stage that finishes in the former F1 venue at Imola is perfect for CCC and Maciej Paterski in particular, one of the team’s star riders. The Pole has already clinched stage one of the Volta a Catalunya after a breakaway win.

“It’s a good stage for Paterski, teammate [Marek] Rutkiewicz and we will try to find a chance to be on the podium.”

Wadecki is under no illusions how hard the final two weeks of racing will be and how tough it will be to get their stage win that they so badly want.

“It’s going to be difficult because so many teams are trying to be in the breaks, the first step is to get in there and then the break has to get to the finish. But at the moment that's very difficult because Astana is racing at such a high level.”

In the final week the team’s stage win hopes fall on Sylvester Szmyd, a veteran of 11 Giros and a great mountain climber, who won on the Ventoux in the 2003 Dauphine.

“We’ll see what happens but in the third week, we have Szmyd too, for the high mountain stages. He’s lost a lot of time already so maybe he’ll have an easier time getting into breaks. Maybe he’ll have a chance.”