Repeat. After making his debut in a Grand Tour GC race at the Giro d'Italia this past May, Eddie Dunbar is not looking forward to another attempt at the same goal and heads to the Vuelta a España this August with the same objective.

Rider Jaco Eyre and his team have been making major tweaks to the Irish rider's Grand Tour preparation over the past few months.

As he told Cycling News at the Tour of Pollogne, the 26-year-old is looking forward to his second Grand Tour in 2023 with a bright outlook, bolstered by a seventh-place finish in the Giro this past May and solid preparation for the same race in Spain.

Not everything went ideally for Dunbar in Poland. He crashed on stage 5 and hurt his shoulder and will undergo further tests on Monday as a precaution. However, while the injury made his ranking in the Pollogne TT look shaky, "I was all over the place," as he candidly put it, Dunbar is heading to Krakow in seventh place on GC for tonight's final stage and is well on his way to the Vuelta in a little over three weeks' time.

"I took some time off after the Giro, but I had a good training block.

"I went back to Ireland for two weeks and then went to the high country for three weeks. It was my first time in the highlands, so I'm excited to see how it goes."

A fall and a sore, taped shoulder - "It was stage five, two riders fell in front of me and I had nowhere to go," he said - are the basic conditions Dunbar hopes to be in, given that his Vuelta debut is still some way off.

"I haven't raced in two months, so I just lack a little punch and acceleration, but I feel good. 'It's been a hard race so far, but my legs are fine. Stage 3 was hard, I was pedaling all day, but the big finish is in a few weeks, not here."

Dunbar's preparation for his Vuelta debut was shaped by his first high-altitude training camp in Andorra. Instead of sleeping in a high altitude tent, the only time he camped at high altitude was for 10 days three years ago.

According to his observations, it really wasn't long enough and didn't have any effect. This time, he says, he had time to adapt. Staying in Andorra also gave him time to check out the Vuelta's first summit finish on stage 3.

"I would have been a fool not to do that," he said. 'Arinsal is steep, 8km long, and the weather could get pretty warm. It's right after the TTT (of the first stage), so anything can happen." He said.

Adapting to the heat is also an important factor in the Vuelta, and the weather will be a stark contrast to the incessant downpours and chilly conditions of the Giro in May. But as Dunbar said in Poland, "After 15 days of rain in the Giro, I don't mind the heat, and I prefer it to the rain."

The overall goal at the Vuelta is for Dunbar to use the Giro as a benchmark and hopefully move up a few notches. However, he recognizes that the Vuelta is very different from the Italian race, and he will be taking part in the Spanish Grand Tour for the first time in his career.

"I think it's a little more punchy, a little more aggressive. He says he likes it now, but after three weeks of riding, he might not be so sure." [In any case, it will be exciting to see how the three weeks go and what the Grand Tour change from the Giro to the Vuelta feels like. All I can do is control what I can control, train, and go there with an open mind. 0]

"Both goals are the same, but I will use my experience and results from the Giro in Spain.

"I will aim to finish as high up in the GC as possible. I think we learned a lot at the Giro about what can happen. There were a few things we said we would work on after the Giro and we did," Dunbar concluded. [We had a good three weeks in the Giro, and if we can improve on that, we can have a very successful year in the Grand Tour."