Mark Cavendish ready to support Mikael Landa at the Vuelta a Burgos

Landa is the team's Tour de France leader, making the Spanish event something of a trial run for Bahrain McLaren.

The squad and staff members have endured pay deferrals due to the Covid-19 pandemic and have also suffered the loss of Brent Copeland, who left to become general manager at Mitchelton-Scott.

The wider McLaren company has had to make 1,200 redundancies in Britain, which could put in doubt their commitment to sponsoring the cycling team beyond the current season.

Cavendish is aiming for victory on the Vuelta a Burgos stages two and four, which should finish with sprints at the death. Meanwhile Landa will target the general classification in France and also at Burgos.

“We had our final training camp in Germany with my sprinter team-mates, and then a few of us head to Burgos; a race which will get us back into the swing of things,” Cavendish said in a press release.

“We are going there to support Mikel Landa who has been training full-gas with the guys for Tour de France, so he is in incredible form”.

Damiano Caruso, Pello Bilbao and Eros Capecchi will provide support in the mountain regions, and the sprints will bring the attention of Cavendish, Marco Haller and Heinrich Haussler.

“This is it! We have a final few days of training before we go off racing,” said Rod Ellingworth, the team's general manager.

“We’ve had three locations for training over the last few weeks. One in Andorra, one in Italy and one in Germany. The camps all finish this Saturday, and then there are a couple of days to go before we start racing next week in Burgos. Everyone is in good condition and most importantly of all in good health.”