Transcontinental Race No. 5 - TCR5 - #TCRN05 - 2017

Anybody has route guesstimations from CP4 to Meteora?

The debate way upthread was whether to stay in Bulgaria or go into Serbia and Macedonia.
Part of the main road in Bulgaria from Sofia south to the greek border is banned

Björn almost at CP4

PedalEd's instagram story showed skinny pumping up his font tyre at the CP4. Hope it was just a top up rather than any puncture issues.

a bit of walking in his speedplays (auto correct gave me Speedos then!)

That isn't a mental image I wanted when eating lunch !!!

That road must be really sketchy

1 Attachment

.

2 Attachments

suggests Bjorn and James will get time penalties. Assuming the penalty isn't so big, it won't impact the race too much as they're quite a bit ahead.

Quite heavy strapping there..

Jonas' route was already avoiding that road, so he won't be affected by the detour or penalty.

Ian (16) and Geoffroy (93) are just outside Turda so they'll need to take the detour via Campeni (or otherwise) or face a penalty (I think they've still got time to take the E81 and avoid the bigger time penalty if they want).

Mathias (23) is also on a different route and should be able to avoid it without time penalty.

The statement is that the ban only comes into affect 1500 CEST 04/08/17 and that time penalties only if used after this time. Imagine experience of Bjorn and James informed introduction of the ban and they have picked the time to try and allow anyone who has taken it/already on it not to be penalised.

Read it again. Anyone who has already taken the road gets a penalty. Anyone taking it before 1500 CEST 04/08/17 gets the same penalty.

Anyone taking it after the 1500 CEST 04/08/17 gets a bigger penalty.

Apolofies you are indeed correct.

I'm guessing the idea is the earlier time penalties will be set in a way that it just evens out the time advantage/disadvantage, then on the basis of fair warning the later penalties will be punitive.

Yep, I expect they'll announce the exact time penalties once they've been able to observe how much extra time (on average) it's taking riders to go via the suggested detour.

Jonas is about 8h behind Bjorn so the smaller time penalty should be less than that otherwise it's going to lose Bjorn a place through no fault of his own (the road wasn't banned when he used it).

Skinny took about 3.5h to go between Turda and Sebes (where he slept). Can't work it out simply for Bjorn as his overnight stop was part way through that stage (in Aiud).

Bjorn has lost about 25 minutes to Skinny on the Transfăgărășan climb so far, time gap is up to 3h40.

Geoffroy (93) looks like he's taking the E81.

There'll be some snaps here, perhaps? Only Skinny and Bjorn have passed it so far #notime4pics

1 Attachment

Eleanor and grace have both scratched.

Eleanor and grace have both scratched.

Sad to read this, but happy to read they've decided to go for a bit more cycling by touring through Slovakia.

Anyone got any idea how routes will be planned through Greece? Im currently staying in Thessaloniki so would be awesome to get some snaps of Skinny on his way to a win (touch wood) if possible

He said I should get tubeless ask fixed flat on cp3 descent. The git. Did expect him higher but he had some poor routing

Geoffroy (93) appears to have started on the banned road. I wonder if he hasn't had chance to read about the banned road and is just pressing on with his route or has decided to take the time penalty.

It looks like Ian (16) has stopped, assuming for re-routing so will probably see him avoid the E81 road.

With the penalties to the front two and Geoffroy (weather aware of it or not) and Ian having to re-route it looks like Jonas (60) is safely on the podium.

1 Attachment

@skinny soundcloud feed started auto-playing on my work computer - really heavy breathing, and references to "dripping with sweat" has gone down a treat with colleagues

Yeah it's a good one

Out.

Geoffroy on a bit of a flyer today. Has leapfrogged Matthias and Ian and been catching Jonas, although penalty^ might complicate that.
Matthias seems to have done a bit of an Ian today and is slipping further back while savouring the wilderness.

Huh