I'm just in the final stages of getting ready for one of the events I run
each year, the 7/24, which is a 400Km event (for legal/insurance reasons a
reliability ride not a race) which includes both road and technical
mountain bike stages, and is run as a relay by teams of four riders, so
each team only has one rider on the course at any one time. This is quite
fun and quite exciting, but I've been thinking of a different event
format...
We have in this region a lot of unmetalled roads, many of them forestry
roads, many of them over very lumpy hills. It would be easy to put
together a course for a day race of anywhere between 100 and 200 (or even
more) Km with about half on tarmac and half on unmetalled road. On such a
route you could use 'road bike' tactics - teams, a peloton, breakaways,
support cars - without nearly so much of an issue about road closures as
you get using the public roads.
This would be sort of Paris-Roubaix like, except the unmetalled sections
are more dirt than cobbles, and would be a lot longer (and with much
bigger climbs) than Paris-Roubaix. I doubt you could run road bikes on
this - or at least, of course you could run road bikes, but you'd have
equipment failures, and I think a team using cross bikes would outcompete
an equally talented team riding road bikes.
So: event format: one-day, classic-style, under road-racing rules, possibly
with start and finish in the same place, long unmetalled sections with
some severe climbs (and some really fast descents), no main roads, rolling
road closure when on tarmac, unmetalled sections closed to other traffic,
probably 120Km the first year, either longer or shorter in subsequent
years depending on how the teams feel about it. Obviously (at least at
first) this would be for amateur club teams. Do you think it would attract
riders? Would you want to ride it?
--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; have mercy on the slender grass