Last year Jonathan Vaughters took a risk and began reshaping his already successful Garmin-Sharp squad.

But the risk has paid off so far with Phil Gaimon’s stage at the Tour de San Luis and Tom-Jelte Slagter’s double stage win in Paris-Nice.

“Obviously Tom-Jelte has done a pretty fricking incredible job. So I’m pretty happy about that,” Vaughters told VeloNews this week. “What are we, like [seven] for the year? … Normally for us, we’re a pretty slow starting team, and this year we hardly even raced in February. So if you look at the percentage of races we’ve done to the percentage of races we’ve won, I think we’re batting a higher average than we ever have at this point in the year. So that’s good.”

Vaughters signed many young riders such as the aforementioned stage winning duo and Ben King, Dylan van Baarle and Lasse Norman Hansen as well as experienced riders like Sebastain Langeveld and Janier Acevedo. This is needed as last year the team lost Christian Vande Velde and Dave Zabriskie to retirement and David Millar is going down the same route at the end of the year.

It’s not just new signings that have won though. Jack Bauer has 2 wins and Nathan Haas, an early season revelation, has one win.

And the team looks strong going into the Classics with a host of previous Monument winners in its ranks. 2011 Flanders winner Nick Nuyens is joined by 2011 Roubaix winner Johan van Summeren in the cobbles and they have Langeveld to support them, a man who is very consistent in these races. 2013 Liege winner Dan Martin heads the Ardennes team.

“As far as the cobbled stuff goes, I think we’re going to do a lot better than people give us credit for. I think Sebastian Langeveld is going to be really good starting at Milan-Sanremo. I think Van Summeren is going to have a really good Paris-Roubaix. I think we’ve got a solid classics squad,” Vaughters said. “Do we have Tom Boonen or [Fabian] Cancellara? No. But we’ve got a solid, solid cobbled classics squad that can pull off the very darkhorse upset victory like we’ve done before. It can happen again this year. Will it happen again this year, who knows? But I think the pieces are in place to do that.”

“Looking forward to the Ardennes, I think Tom-Jelte is going to be great,” Vaughters said. “If we look at Amstel Gold and Flèche Wallonne — if Tom-Jelte keeps his head on and doesn’t get too nervous, because he’s still a very young rider — I think he actually could win either one of those. From what I saw at Paris-Nice, up the Muur de Huy or the Cauberg, as long as he keeps his head on and we keep him healthy between now and those races, I don’t see any reason he’s not right in contention to win either one of those.”

“Dan Martin is a little bit behind where he was last year. He’s on a different — last year Liège was the last race he did before he took a big break,” Vaughters said. “This year, the day after Liege he has to basically get back out there and start preparing for the Giro. He’s on a different trajectory. I think he’ll still end up being incredibly strong at Liege-Bastogne-Liege. I just don’t know we’ll see a lot from Dan Martin before Liege-Bastogne-Liege.”

For the Grand Tours, it will be Martin and Ryder Hesjedal for the Giro and Andrew Talansky for the Tour de France. All three have hardly lit up 2014 but according to Vaughters are slowly building condition for their Grand Tour goals, particularly Talansky.

“I think Tirreno, we had some trouble in the team time trial mechanically, so that was a bit of a pisser. But Andrew, he did a solid race at Tirreno but it wasn’t special,” Vaughters said “He’s in that upper 15, 20 percent of riders in the peloton, but he’s not at the level where he was at Paris-Nice last year. Now that doesn’t necessarily surprise me too much. He did the Vuelta and he raced really hard all the way to the end of the year [last season], so he sort of had that as a springboard for his spring condition.”

“As soon as he started training hard in January, boom, he was right back into condition. This year he did the Tour and then he didn’t race a ton … he didn’t really race that much until the end of the year. So I think he’s having a little bit more trouble popping back into the condition that he wanted to.”

While his big stars are not firing yet, Vaughters is calm and rightly so, as his team looks set to dominate cycling in all aspects on the road for the next 5 to 10 years.

“Looking down the road, Tour of Romandie, Dauphiné, Tour de France, I don’t really see that as a problem,” Vaughters said. “I think that’s just sort of something that fixes itself over the next month.”

This means that should all go to plan, Garmin will have very good results in the first two Grand Tours and all the cobbled races and Ardennes races through Dan Martin, Tom-Jelte Slagter, Ryder Hesjedal, Johan van Summeren and Sebastain Langeveld.

But with the way Garmin have started 2014, don’t be surprised to see other riders from the team win big races this year.