When the Giro d'Italia organizers RCS Sport announced a list of teams that had applied for a wildcard invitation for next year's edition of the Italian grand tour, a lot of attention was drawn by the fact that the YellowFluo team, formerly known as Vini Fantini, was missing from the list. The team now confirms that it intends to apply for invitations for all RCS races and doesn't hope that the doping cases of Danilo Di Luca and Mauro Santambrogio will play any role.

The Vini Fantini team left this year's Giro d'Italia in disgrace after Danilo Di Luca had been ejected from the race due to a positive pre-race test whose result was revealed just two days before the end of the race. Things became even worse a few days later when it emerged that Mauro Santambrogio who had won a big mountain stage and finished in the top 10 overall had tested positive on the first day of the race.

It was rumoured that team manager Luca Scinto would throw in the towel and close the team but he changed his mind. Despite losing Vini Fantini as main sponsor, he managed to secure the necessary funding to continue the project that is currently known as YellowFluo until the identity of the new sponsor is revealed.

As an Italian team, Vini Fantini has been an almost guaranteed participant in the Giro d'Italia in recent years and the team has had much success. In 2011 Oscar Gatto won a stage ahead of Alberto Contador and one year later 2012 both Matteo Rabottini and Andrea Guardini crossed the line in first position while Rabottini went on to win the mountains jersey. This year the team gained much attention by virtue of Santambrogio's good performances.

The team has enjoyed much goodwill from organizers RCS Sport that has invited the team to all its biggest races. However, the team chose to give back its wildcard invitation for this year's Il Lombardia in light of the doping scandals and knows that it faces a lot of work to regain credibility.

When the team was missing from the initial list of wildcard applicants for next year's Giro, their absence was quickly linked to the doping positives. However, the Giro organizers told Velonation that the team still had time to apply for an invitation and now the team confirms that it intends to do so.

“We have time until the 15th of December to send our marketing project and our candidate for the Giro d’Italia and all the other races of RCS Sport,” team spokesman Francesco Pelosi told VeloNation. “It is simple – all the teams have to complete the dossier and send to RCS. We have time to do this, we have another twenty days. We will do everything at once then, the candidature for all the races. Waiting for the last week is better for us.”

While the team confirmed that news about its sponsor will be announced soon, it refused that their late application had anything to do with the lack of a main backer.

“It is nothing to do with the main sponsor as we have already concluded the negotiations," Pelosi said. "We simply want to be able to add other ideas to our dossier, which has more or less been finished. Also, last year and two years ago, when we had no problem about sponsors or any other things, we also sent the dossier in the final week.”
 

Pelosi hopes that the doping cases will have no influence on the RCS decision.

“I don’t know if it will affect things,” he said. “We are a professional team and as was the case in the other years, we need to conquer the trust of RCS. Normally I think it is clear for RCS and also the fans that the problem about the doping of Di Luca and Santambrogio is something that was separate to our management. They are both singular [independent ] issues.”

From Wednesday to Friday, the team will gather in Montecatini Terme for a three-day meeting that will allow them to talk to each rider on the squad.

“We will start our work for 2014 season with renewed enthusiasm and a certainty we have made some major changes at the level of preparation and [internal] controls,” Scinto said. “I will not be alone in the management of training and next week we will reveal the partners we have chosen. With professionalism and without rushing things, we will speak ‘one to one’ with each rider with careful attention.”

The team has managed to keep riders like Francesco Chicchi, Rabottini, Mauro Finetto, Rafael Andriato, Yonathan Monsalve and Daniele Colli that will team up with the major new signing, Simone Ponzi from Astana. Yesterday it was announced that the team has signed Alessandro Malaguti from Androni-Venezuela and the team will announce its final three signings later this week.