Greg Van Avermaet's BMC custom cobble machine looks stunning

Greg Van Avermaet launched his Classic's campaign last weekend at the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad with a pretty awesome custom BMC Team Machine SLR01, which due to a lack of results over the weekend, should have at least given Van Avermaet something to smile about.

BMC's new bike, which launched last year, actually made it into our Editor's Choice 2017 awards for being a pretty amazing bike. Interestingly enough, Van Avermaet opted to use the rim braked version over the opening weekend of his Classics campaign.

The bike was born out of 34,000 prototypes generated by a supercomputer the size of a room according to BMC. The aim, of course, is to make the bike stiffer, lighter yet improve ride compliance. From our testing this seems to be the case.

This custom paint scheme as expected holds gold tones to represent Greg Van Avermaet's Olympic road race in 2016 and is joined by a rather classy silver grey. Previous iterations of his bike has seen gold used exclusively.

Of course, being a partner of BMC, Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 is used throughout along with Shimano Dura-Ace wheels. Vittoria Corsa tanned walled tyres finish the looks off nicely. GVA favours the Fizik Antares as his saddle of choice.

The dropped rear stay, 'D' shaped seatpost and seat tube, along with the chunky tyres of the BMC Team Machine SLR01 should offer decent comfort levels for Greg Van Avermaet to tackle the cobbles with spring.

Van Avermaet will have his chance to do battle again but he has a little bit of a gap before the next gabble of big one day classic races, hopefully putting his early form to good use.