Following a successful return late in the season from a horror crash sustained at the Giant-Alpecin pre-season camp, John Degenkolb has said it was the right time to move on to Trek-Segafredo.

Degenkolb was with Giant-Alpecin since 2012 and won two Monuments and 11 Grand Tour stage on the team. But a shift to Grand Tour racing with Warren Barguil and Tom Dumoulin, as well as the arrival of Michael Matthews convinced the German it was time to go.

"We had some great success but sometimes you start to think about other opportunities. I was also asking for more support for the Classics and I didn't really get it. The team always worked well for me but I didn't like the way the management was running the team anymore. I had too little influence on the decisions that affected me as a rider. It was time for me to move on from Giant-Alpecin," he told Cyclingnews.

"I'm the guy who is responsible if things work or not, if I get the results or not in the big races. If I don't have influence on who is going to me with the races, then things aren't perfect any more. Until a certain time it worked but not any more. Now I believe that at Trek-Segafredo I can be an even better bike rider than I am now. My current team didn't want that for some reason."

Despite this Degenkolb admits leaving the team was not easy at all, as after half a decade, he had many friends on the team.

"Of course it hurts. It's a big change and I have to leave a lot of friends. There's a great bunch of people at Giant-Alpecin. I'll especially miss the other riders on the team. They helped me achieve what I achieved in the past and so it's hard to leave most of them. Fortunately my coach and Koen de Kort are coming with me to Trek-Segafredo," Degenkolb said.

Both Trek and Degenkolb have been keen to state that he is not a direct replacement for Swiss legend and 7-time Monument winner Fabian Cancellara.

"I'm not a replacement for Fabian Cancellara because I'm a very different kind of rider," Degenkolb points out. "But I think our Classics squad we'll have for 2017 is pretty much as good as it was this year with Fabian. Maybe in a different kind of way but we have a good chance to make it a great Classics season for Trek Segafredo.”