After just 36 race days for Orica-GreenEDGE this year, Leigh Howard is already preparing for 2016 with his new IAM team. The 25 year old wants to help Matteo Pelucchi before being able to lead the Swiss WorldTour team in some races himself.

“I’m trying to build-up a good foundation in the gym and I’ve got an extra month to get that, really work on some power and get a bit more speed back because I just haven’t sprinted this year,” he told Cyclingtips.

“I’ve been working for Caleb, which was great but I’m a sprinter at heart and I’d like to do my own sprints as well.”

He says his lack of racing wasn’t because he was changing teams, but because the team just didn’t select him to ride races. He says he wasn’t the only one on the Australian team that suffered this problem either.

“It was just the team gave me hardly any racing this year. I haven’t even counted my race days, I’m scared to look, but I don’t think I cracked 40,” he reflected. “It wasn’t so much just me either there was quite a few, even guys like Mat Hayman.”

“I crashed in [the February Tour of] Qatar, which knocked me out of Oman and then I missed Tour of Turkey because I had tendonitis so two races there, which was a bit annoying. It was a pretty lean season.”

Howard says he still sees himself as a team leader but as he wasn’t able to sprint for himself, he wasn’t able to prove this to anyone else.

“It’s hard to prove your worth when you don’t get to sprint. And then if you do good lead-outs and the other guy does win then you’ve done a great job and you’re going to keep doing the same thing because he won,” he continued.

“It was just really hard to stop. Unless you stand-up and completely ignore team orders, and that’s not who I am, and go solo in the races then it’s pretty hard to prove yourself.”

He says he had to change team and that he hopes his new surroundings can kick-start his career.

“In order for me to keep moving forward I needed to change. Hopefully with this change it’s a clean slate and I can keep moving forward instead of stagnant or downhill.”