The Hour Record

Thanks for the link

So how much will the concrete surface affect crr vs typical wooden surface? And also I wonder how much the air pressure in the big balloon will affect things.

wonder how much the air pressure in the big balloon will affect things.

Much less than the fact that they're at >6000' asl. The pressure needed to keep those inflatable building up is tiny, 10mb would be heavy duty.

Absolute pressure at the velodrome was reported as 812mb

Still waiting for an Hour attempt with competent commentary; this time they're calling out the gap to the old record in seconds when the on screen display clearly shows that the number they're using is the speed delta in km.h^-1.

The commentary is abysmal. I've turned it off.

She is looking very good for the record but a bit wobbly in the turns - fatigue must be really setting in.

She got a bit cyclocross there over the track sponges.

Hutch said 70m I think on twitter yest for the balloon pressure

Solid effort that. I wonder if she'll have another go at the outright record?

Stevens rode the first four efforts on a 54×15 gear. After her fourth effort, at 46kph, Henderson changed the gear ratio, though he wouldn’t disclose the gearing.
“We’re going to keep that to ourselves for now,” Henderson said. “We’ll tell you after the Hour Record attempt. Probably.”

Do we know what gearing she settled on?

I thought she had two bikes, one with 53x14 and one with 54x14.

I thought she had two bikes, one with 53x14 and one with 54x14.

The commentary said they were dithering between between 53/14 and 54/14 and finally settled on the lower gear. I would expect both bikes to have been set up with the same gear once they had come to a decision.

Yeah, that was from before the attempt.

Here's a link to the film of Rob Gilmour's Vets' Hour record:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCVGZR9xGRU

https://ssllracingteam.com/2016/04/16/uci-masters-world-hour-record-attempt/

And the challenge is this: to ride your bike for one hour and in that time, to travel further than 35.325km.
Why 35.325km? This is the distance of the first ever hour record, set on the Buffalo Velodrome in Paris by Henri Desgrange in 1893. By riding further than this you'll not only know what it’s was like to have been the fastest cyclist in the world in 1893 but you'll have beaten the man who dreamed up the Tour de France and ran the race during its most brutal, punishing era.
How it works:
Record your hour attempt using the Strava app on a smartphone or a GPS device. Post your rides to the club page. You can have as many attempts as you like.
Attempts shall be on a road course of your choice. Any pedal-powered machine is OK. Recumbents and trikes are more than welcome. You may find it less of a challenge on a super aerodynamic laid back machine, but the choice is entirely up to you.
The start and end points of the course should be within 3km of each other. So no sailing away to glory on a brisk tailwind.
The altitude of the end point of the course must be within 20 vertical metres of altitude of the start point. i.e. no going to the top of a mountain and riding down to the bottom.

PB by 200 meters today 35.7km on 51X18 https://www.strava.com/activities/569589075

Good work.

Now throw a bigger gear on :)

Hour record attempt this Saturday

My clubmate Loz Wintergold will go for the VTTA and Hounslow club Hour Records at Herne Hill this Saturday evening. The track is booked for 7 pm.

Loz has had a long TT career marked by flashes of brilliance, but sometimes marred by spectacular bike failures. He is certainly capable of a strong performance at this rare discipline.

Naturally, supporters would be welcome and, given the timing, there will be plenty of Saturday evening left to go to the pub.

VTTA and Hounslow Records Broken

I must apologise for having taken so long to post this report.
It's been a very busy summer!

Hour Record at Herne Hill.

Elite-isation* : The process by which attention is increasingly paid only to those at the very top. That’s the way of sport generally in the twenty first century and it is certainly true in cycling, where many newcomers now have no aspirations beyond riding sportives, and ‘The Hour’ is seen as the very tip of the pinnacle, only to be contemplated by ordinary mortals as something that happens on the television.

I’m proud to say that the Hounslow and District Wheelers stands out against the spirit of the age and recently has seen three different members make successful attempts at hour records.

Loz Wintergold is the latest in our series. His targets were the club’s open air record and the VTTA record for his age group, which both stood to the Hounslow’s Rob Gilmour who set the distance at 25.612 miles at Palmer Park, Reading in 2014 when he was sixty three years of age. A further possible target was the 26.602 miles recorded by Steve McGraw (a former international) in 2011 when he was forty eight. Under VTTA rules, if a distance achieved by an older recordman exceeds the distance covered by a younger record holder, the older man’s record prevails and the existing record for the younger age is considered to have been beaten. Loz was fifty one at the time of this ride.

For a rider whose recent 25 mile performances on the road have been significantly faster than this and who had been able, in training, to lap consistently at 26.8 mph these seemed easily achievable ambitions. However, as we have seen before, the hard reality of these attempts is quickly revealed once the rider is on the track. On the evening of the attempt (23rd July) the conditions were reasonable but far from perfect with a tough headwind on the back straight and the sun still powerful enough to make shade seem desirable, although by about half distance both these problems did become less troublesome.

Starting just after 7.30pm Loz appeared to settle quickly into the necessary pace, lapping consistently at just under 39 seconds, enough for the club record, but never allowing him to be up on his ambitious schedule which anticipated an 80 second improvement on the record.

Jeff Marshall stood at the trackside near the timekeeper with a red and green board to indicate whether the rider was ahead (green) or behind schedule. It quickly became clear that the plan was over optimistic and with 20 minutes completed Loz was 10 seconds slower than he had hoped, a deficit which gradually doubled in the remaining 40 minutes. This meant that the first two objectives (the club and the VTTA 51 year records) were achieved with almost a minute in hand, but the 48 year age record was not beaten. Perhaps the recordman’s morale would have benefitted from seeing that green board on display.

As the hour ran out Loz had completed 26.022 miles (41.878 kilometres), comfortably improving on the distance he had set out to beat. However our man was not really satisfied with his performance, which, perhaps surprisingly to us ordinary folk, he felt was sub optimal.

This is an exercise where hindsight can be beneficial and Loz accepts that not every decision taken before the ride was perfect. He feels that his gear (97”, 55x15) was too high for the prevailing conditions and that his machine was not ideal for the job. It was actually his ordinary time trial bike modified for the occasion, but the alterations included a change of position to which he was not fully acclimatized. Apart from the bike he feels that his starting effort was too hard and that more relaxed pacing would give a better result. Will we see our man in action again? The answer is - Yes! - He’s already looking for another available slot at the track.

And just to show that there are other Hounslow members whose enthusiasm has not been damaged by the passage of fleeting years, Rob Gilmour has booked a slot at Newport on the 26th October to attack the UCI 65 to 69 years World Hour Record. We wish them both Good Luck!

*A new but necessary word – perhaps it should be spelled ‘elitisation’ although this makes the pronunciation doubtful, whereas ‘eliteisation’ looks wrong because of the ei juxtaposition. You decide.

Thanks Chris - an interesting read. Chapeau to Loz. I'm afraid i am probably part of the problem re elitisation but there are lots of people on here taking up crits, track league, CX season. Maybe this broadening can make traditional road racing and TTs appear to have dwindling importance to new amateur racers

"change of position to which he was not fully acclimatized"

tuts and rolls eyes... while hiding allen keys from sight...

In my mind the most important reason for the popularity of time trialling in this country was the support it got over many decades from Cycling (the weekly magazine).

Now that the coverage has more or less gone this side of the sport is suffering, which is a great pity from the elite-isation point of view since it does allow less than brilliant riders (like me) to take part. Internet magazines like VeloUK can go some way to solving this problem, but someone has to write the reports. I think all open event organisers should try to get a race report into digital ink.

Road racing is a bit different. Organising a road race is a daunting task now, even though BC support is good. Races used to be organised by traditional clubs so that their riders could get rides in other clubs' events, but now any rider in such a club who shows any kind of promise will be tempted away into sponsored 'race teams' which generally don't see fit to promote events.

Nice report, cheers. I'll ask around if there's any record attempts at World Masters in Oct. There were a couple last year.

Here are some pictures from Herne Hill which I should have posted with the story.

1 Attachment

another

another try

1 Attachment