Update: I'm on a cycling team but really only know them electronically. Because they live kinda far from me (where I used to live on the other side of town). I finally went on a small Sat. morning group ride with them. And met a Cat 5 racer. he was really nice, gave me a lot of insight. He's a new racer with about 8 starts under his belt. He's built kind of like me. He weighs about 200lb (me 190lb). We were going through a few rollers and the guy in front of me dropped the hammer on the last hill. I held his wheel, but the cat 5 racer got dropped. Perversely, that gave me some encouragement. He said he just did a 13 min FTP test where he held 300 watts. I doubt I could do that. But strava just upgraded my estimated FTP to 229w, and my 1 second peak power is now over 1400w. So maybe it is reasonable for me to give it a go. Plus I might have teammates I can work for/with.

I've also watched a couple of sprinter della casa's videos, so I've got the race tactics thing down in my head.