A potential day for the breakaway at the Tour de Hongrie saw a fast pace in the opening part o the stage with lots of attacks in the peloton and no breakaway initially able to form out front. Eventually, the elastic snapped and a strong seven rider group which featured Niklas Märkl went clear. Working well together they built up a gap but those who had missed out in the peloton didn’t allow it to extend to much more than one minute and 30 seconds. For the last 40 kilometres Märkl’s advantage fluctuated between 20 and 40 seconds, before eventually the peloton made the catch inside three kilometres to go. In the peloton the rest of the team looked after Frank van den Broek, moving him up in the finale. The last one and a half kilometres were uphill, with some steeper pitches towards the end. Fighting to the line, Van den Broek came past a few riders in the closing metres to take a solid seventh place for the team on the day.
After his day in the break Märkl said: “It was a nice stage for us with quite some opportunities. In the beginning the jumping took quite a while. After around 40 kilometres into the stage there was a climb where I managed to create a nice break of seven. We had quite a few strong engines in there but the bunch never really let us go more than one and a half minutes basically, so that was a bit unfortunate. We tried to play it smart and kept it easy until the pre-final where we started to speed up and kept the bunch away for us for a long time. At three kilometres to go I tried something but hitting the penultimate climb the bunch caught us. Behind the guys looked after Frank well and he finished seventh. It was a good day out for us where we tried something and showed that we want to go for it. There is still a nice stage to come tomorrow where we can try again; the legs are good and the guys are motivated.”