2013 Milan-Sanremo winner Gerald Ciolek has made returning to the Tour de France for his first participation since 2011 a big goal for his 2015 season.

The German’s current team, MTN-Qhubeka, are one of the forerunners for a wild card invite to the biggest race in the cycling season and have had their confidence boosted by invites to ASO races the Tour of Qatar and Tour of Oman this week.

“That would be a great thing. To be the first African team going to the Tour de France would be really good,” he told CyclingTips this week. “For myself, I already forgot about the suffering in the Tour de France. I would be glad to go back."

“It is the biggest race in the world and all the riders are super ambitious and super excited to ride in it.”

MTN-Qhubeka have made some big signings this year to help them in the Classics and to get them invited to the Tour, such as Edvald Boasson Hagen, Tyler Farrar, Matt Goss and Theo Bos. This should give the team a strong line-up and a great chance of achieving success at the Tour should they be invited.

“We are adding a lot more strong riders to the team, so that give us more possibilities in the races,” he said. “We had this year three or four guys who can win races, but next year we will have probably eight or ten guys who are able to do that. That gives us a bunch of possibilities.”

With General Manager Brian Smith telling CyclingTips last week that Bos was the team’s only bunch sprinter, Ciolek will have to make do with reduced bunch finishes on tough courses and he will face competition there from the likes of Farrar, Goss, Boasson Hagen and Reinardt Janse van Rensburg.

“I guess that is a thing we still have to figure out. We need to train this and see how we fit together,” Ciolek explained. “Then it is also about making a race programme where everybody gets his goals and know what you can focus on. Once that’s done, it’s up to the others to support the guy who is chosen for the races.”

Ciolek’s 2013 was a dream one, with wins in Sanremo, Austria, Britain, Bayern-Rundfahrt and Driedaagse van West-Vlaanderen. 2014 was a much more somber affair, with only stage three of the Vuelta a Andalucia as a chance to raise his arms.

“In general the season went all right,” he said, looking back at recent months and how things panned out. “There were some goals I couldn’t achieve, things that didn’t go like I hoped them to go. But otherwise I am quite happy with the season.”

But Ciolek really wanted to perform in MTN-Qhubeka’s debut Grand Tour, the Vuelta a Espana and he says he failed in this objective.

“The Vuelta was a big goal at the end of the year but it went pretty bad for myself,” he said, referring to a campaign which brought best stage placings of 11th and 16th. “That was the bad point about last year.”

And he says his 2015 campaign will “more or less be the same as last year”, meaning he will ride the Spring Classics, where as mentioned earlier, his team have even more strength and experience to add to their roster.