As the series won't be starting up again until October 2008, this site will be a bit quiet until probably July or August.  We'll be setting up all the old results & photos into year by year archives so they'll always be available, and we will probably also move the site from Plone 2.5 to Plone 3.1 at some time mid-year when the blogging plugin, Quills, works with Plone 3.1 so we can migrate the current blog entries across.

So until then, a bit of peace & quiet here.  If you're interested in training for the series in summer '08-'09, feel free to contact us at www.aboc.com.au for guidance.

The TSSS for 2007-2008 is done.  It's been a fantastic experience and a lot of fun, and a lot of work!  We've learned heaps about how to make these races run smoothly, we've been a bit lucky (no crashes, no major race incidents, only lost one day due to weather), we've had some minor mistakes we've learned from and we'll be back next summer with improvements and we very much hope an enthusiastic and passionate team of people to run the series and to race it.  I'll have a race report online tomorrow (Mon 7^th). 

I got a real thrill from being part of it, and watching riders achieve things they didn't think they could, have a try at something they'd never done, and perform at their best under pressure.  Handing the T1 frame to Big Jeremy today was a great experience, and watching Dino pull off an incredible day's racing today was icing on the cake.

On the whole the series is, I think, a success, but we cannot sit back and say "we're perfect", we can do better, we can make the draw less error prone, we can promote the series better.  We can make our riders feel more welcome and we can give better information to spectators. Please, if you're reading this and you care about the series for next season, have a think about how you can help improve it.  We need your ideas and suggestions and if you want more match sprinting, we need your input.

Last night we went out to Mark Gardiner's warehouse in Langwarrin to pick up the Trek tent and some more banners to put around the track, the camera batteries are fully charged, we're ready to go for round 6.

See you at the velodrome! The weather is perfect, sunny, light breeze ... it's all good.

Firstly, a special thanks to Bev, who has made lunches (ripper salad rolls!) for everyone who's helped at the series! When we're busy trying to make sure everything's set up, everyone's where they should be etc we don't have time to look after ourselves much, and having food and drinks handy is a great help.  Bev's donated more than her fair share of time and money to the series and we owe her a big thankyou.

What's been going on? I've been pestering Trek for the series prize, and we now have a box with a frame in it ready to present to our series winner. It's a 56cm frame, if that's the wrong size we can swap it.

We're also talking with Trek about the next series and if they're willing to support us again. I hope so, I think the series is worth supporting, but that's Trek's decision and we have to make sure that it makes sense for them to be involved. They want to sell bikes, and this has to help get their name out there and that's something we can't afford to forget. I've done the best I can this season to promote the series, but the job is far from complete and I know we can do better next year with more experience and hopefully our enthusiastic competitors will help spread the word far and wide.

One thing we have no say on is the weather, and the forecast for Sunday is ideal, a pleasant 21 degrees. Eddie Wilson asked for a cool day and we've done our best, but he can't make it to the final round because of an injury. Next series Ed ... We will miss you for this one, you're a true gentleman of the sport and the example you set to the other riders is a very good one indeed.

We've made no further changes to the rules and way we run the races for this round.

I've invited many people to the post-race BBQ including Lorraine Collings and Mal Sawford from Carnegie Caulfield, who I hope will come along and maybe Mal will race the series next summer. We've also invited all the Blackburn people who've been involved in the summer track racing program, they all deserve a thankyou and this is my chance to thank them.

Lastly, we're (as usual) hoping that we'll get a healthy turn out of riders. We've done a heap of work to make this all happen all summer and all the feedback we've had has been positive and encouraging, we need YOU to show up and race with us!  The weather's going to be good, the racing runs smoothly and you get lots of chances to match it with riders that will challenge you.  Come and race with us!

Here's a little python script that I use to calculate flying 200 speeds from times, unlikely to be much use to anyone, but you never know ...

#!/usr/pkg/bin/python2.4

import sys

if __name__ == "__main__":
    try:
        F200t = float(sys.argv[1])
    except IndexError:
        print "usage : speed_fromf200.py  [distance]"
    except ValueError:
        print "Time must be a number in seconds, please"
    else:
        F200t = float(sys.argv[1])

    try:
        Dist = float(sys.argv[2])
    except IndexError:
        Dist = 200
    except ValueError:
        print "Distance must be a number in metres please, assuming you meant 200"
        Dist = 200
    else:
        Dist = float(sys.argv[2])

    Speed = (Dist / F200t) * 3600 / 1000
    print "%d metres time : %f" % (Dist, F200t)
    print "Speed : %f km/h" % (Speed)

else:
    print "*doh*"

The first few rounds of the TSSS were attended by few riders (8, and then 7!), and we want to improve on that.  We've had good attendances at the last 2 rounds, 17 and 18 riders, which made for some great racing, but we want to hit next summer with more momentum.

As such, we're floating ideas for promotions...

One idea is a business card to hand out, here's a proposed version featuring Rob Monteath and Leah Patterson contesting a tight finish in round 1 (photo by Lucie Akers) :

It's small enough (standard business card size) to put in your wallet, and we'll hand it out at DISC over winter etc.  I'm waiting on Trek to approve it, but I doubt they'll want to change it.

We've also done up an A4 PDF poster version, you can get it by clicking on the image on the left.

Any other ideas? How can we make this more attractive for next summer?

Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Round 6 is far from being a dead rubber, there's three riders tied for the T1 frame on points (Jeremy Mclay, Eddie Wilson and Dino Apolito, all on 27 points).  At the moment, big J wins by virtue of his fastest F200 time, but it's close.  The F200 countback will be from the final round if required.

We're waiting (and nagging!) on Trek Australia  for how they want the presentation to run, they've given us some great prizes and it's only fair that we give them the format for the presentation that they want, but they'll have to get back to me, I can't guess it.  James?  Mark? Are you reading this?  What do you want?!

We're having a free BBQ afterwards, which all competitors, volunteers and spectators are invited to, it's our way of thanking everyone who's been involved in the series.  This is also extended to include all the people who've helped out at any of the Blackburn summer track season, they've all done a tower of work and I think deserve at least a few bangers and some bread for their efforts.  This is courtesy of aboc Cycle Coaching.

Of course, in order for the final round to be a success we need more than just Jeremy, Eddie and Dino to race, we want a full card of riders and good weather.  If you're thinking about it, please do come along and race with us.  It's the last lot until next summer, and we'll do our best to make sure you have a fun and rewarding day's match sprinting.  If you are coming, please also help spread the word.  If we can get 20 riders, it'll make for a fantastic day's racing and will give us some real momentum to carry into the next summer series.  Help us to help you get the racing you want.  We can't do it without you!

I had a bit of a chat with John Nicholson last week about the Blackburn velodrome and the record for the Flying 200.  As anyone who's ridden the BBN velodrome knows, these days it's a slow track.  The concrete is bumpy and rough and it's generally windy, and the banks aren't very steep, making 60km/h+ around them quite a bit harder than at, for example DISC.

Nicko (John) couldn't tell me at the time what the record was.  I'd expect that he'd have had a good time, being a former professional world sprint champion ... but he couldn't remember.

So far at the TSSS we've had a 12:10  (59.5 km/h) during a heat (Eddie Wilson) and a 12:16 (59.2 km/h) during qualifying (Jeremy Mclay) as our two fastest times.  Maybe we start a history now?  Does anyone know of a faster time than those two at BBN?

There's been some demand from junior riders to have a go at the TSSS.  As such, without wanting to change the character of the series, we've asked the club for guidance, and they and we have agreed that J19 riders should be able to compete.  J19 riders will be required to run their restricted gearing. For the most part this will be irrelevant, J19 gear restrictions are 7.93m which is bigger than anyone would want to use for match sprinting at Blackburn anyway.

Adam writes :

Hi Carl,
 
Just dropping a quick line to say thanks for the great day yesterday. It 
was my first crack at match sprinting and I had a blast and learnt so 
much. Shame about the numbers, but you guys did a fantastic job and it'd 
have to be one of the best run events I've been to.
 
Hopefully we'll get some more numbers, the only suggestion I can make is 
to hassle the guys who run various websites to put reminders up the week 
before. As I said, I'm now going to be running the CCCC website so I'll 
make sure it is on there, the other sites I'd suggest are the various clubs:
 
www.brunswickcyclingclub.com <http://www.brunswickcyclingclub.com>
www.bbn.org.au <http://www.bbn.org.au>
 
as well as some track specific sites that may pull in a few people:
 
http://www.fyxomatosis.com/
www.fixed.org.au <http://www.fixed.org.au>
 
Well done once again, I think it's a pretty unique series and would 
really like to see it take off because you've obviously put a lot of 
effort into it. I'll be in touch again to order some prints, once I've 
waded through all the photos!
 
Cheers,
- Adam

Eddie Wilson, who convincingly won A grade in round 1 and leads the aggregate, is absent this round, as he's racing up in Wagga.  Nathan Larkin is stuck at work on Sunday(!) and Leah Patterson is recovering from a nasty crash on her roady which saw a bone or two broken.  Leah, on behalf of all of us at the TSSS, I wish you a speedy recovery and hope to see you riding again soon.

For the rest of you, the races are wide open and missing round 1 doesn't mean you can't win the aggregate etc.  Come race with us!

It's a week out, so it's not worth worrying about, but the BoM says showers on Sunday.  I'll be worried if it still says that on Thursday.  7 day forecasts are wild guesses.

We need more of you to race this series.  Eddie Wilson's going to be in Wagga so A grade is wide open, it remains to see who shows up.  I've spoken to Barry "The Wizard' Woods and he's keen, as is Brett Curren, and hopefully John Lewis will show up, and maybe even the Mighty V-Train (Stuart Vaughan).

Rain, we need you, but not on Sunday!

I thought we probably should ... hopefully cyclingnews will put a link to the series on the results page. Might drum up a few more entrants for the next round.

Does anyone want to write a race report for the day? Can I delegate this to one of you? Hands up please!

UPDATE results are now also on Cyclingnews here.

Round one had perfect weather - cool, mostly sunny, light wind (we had a windsock!). The only thing missing was riders. We had 9 (and one had to withdraw due to an unrelated injury). In some ways this was probably a good thing. We have a few parts of our race procedures that need fine tuning.

Firstly, some positive feedback from one of the riders who raced on the day :

Carl,

Well done on today. It worked exceptionally well. The riders will come....

Interesting to see Nicko there he just loves it!

Ten reasons to race SSS:

1. Dedicated sprint racing. All day. No handicaps or points races or motor-paces....

2. After your flying 200 time is recorded, you get a printed draw which states your start time and who you are riding against. No being late to the line. Compact racing. Finishing on time. Where else do you get sprint races like that?!!!

3. Red hot racing. Everyone across all grades earns their wins. 3 races minimum...in a real race environment, complete with 'fire me up' music!

4. A chance to learn sprint tactics. Real tactics. On a forgiving track which isn't 43 degrees steep.... great for newbies or experienced alike

5. Coaches and feedback available to help you improve your race style.

6.A chance to get race ready for the Metros, States and your club championships.

7.A chance to see how your opposition in the above will ride, learn their strengths and weaknesses....hone your skills.

8. Racing lots of different riders, all with different styles and tactics. makes you a smarter rider......

9.A excellent race organisation, where everything pretty much just works. thanks to aboc and BBN...

10. The post race BBQ, where you get to sit around with other sprinters and tell them how good you are!

Possible changes:

Average each grades flying 200 times. winner of overall aggregate is the rider who betters the grade average by highest %. This will hurt A grade riders as their times will be closer. Rewards lower grades.

5 min slots instead of 10, depending on number of riders.

Simplify the logistics.

More as I think of them, but honestly you don't need to change anything yet.

Well done.

So at least one of the riders was very happy, and some of the suggestions made were our default anyway - because we only had 8 riders racing we made the races 3 laps instead of 2 and allowed 10 minutes per race instead of 5.  When we have more riders, we'll need to tighten that up to the original plan, but if we have low numbers, we'll keep the quality of the racing high.  I think that the standard of racing was good.  We had two quite clearly deliniated grades using F200 times and as a result I don't think anyone had a walkover race, there was a couple of very close finishes and certainly in the B grade racing the flying 200 times didn't reflect the final outcome, which meant that the tactical side of the racing played an important part.

We had an issue with doing the draw (my mistake!) and we had to re calculate it and reprint the draw for everyone, and we need to find a way to do the draw more quickly.  As we only had 8, in 2 grades, it was easy, but if we have the full 30 riders and 3 grades that we want to be able to cater for we need to make our draw work faster.   Dino and I will spend some time on it in the next couple of weeks.

Other things we need to remember :

• Have a coin at the start line. Can you believe that none of us had a coin?!  I got to be the tosser for the day!
  
• On the draw, have numbers as well as names.  While we got away with it as at this round there was only two people we didn't know by name already, we'll need this information at the start line and for the commentator.
• Have a marshal roving around making sure (or at least informing) riders of when they need to be ready.  We didn't need it for this round (low numbers so easy logistics) but again, if we get more riders, we'll really need to get riders ready and going on time.
• Make sure we have two people at the scoring desk.  The original plan was to have one, but it seemed to work a lot better with two.  Sanity checks and general efficiency.  Our scoring system worked perfectly, which was great.  Very easy to see who won what and how many points they had etc.
  

I'd personally like to thank all the volunteers that helped out, Bev and Nathan doing the scoring and entries and general paperwork (and Bev making the salad rolls for everyone's lunch, they were great!), Pat, Tabatha and Nicko for being our commisaires and race jury (not required!  No crashes, no protests, good clean racing), Merv and Richard for being our start line holders, timers and finish line judges, Dino for the software and much of the paperwork and Tyler for holding the fort in the cafe for the day and generally helping out, and Lucie for taking the photos.  It's important to thank Trek for their support too, we had the Trek tent at the start line giving us some shade, and of course the daily aggregate prize (Bontrager Race-Lite tyres) which were well received.

I've written a welcome page that explains a bit about the rules and who we are and how we hope the races will go.  Feel free to have a read of it here.

And the BoM says :

Sunday        Mostly fine.                           Min 10    Max 19

After speaking to our chief Commisaire on Tuesday, he wants us to have three commisaires, so he can have independant witnesses to the front and back straights, and an appeals body.

So .. who wants to be a commisaire?  We have 3 weeks to find two commisaires!

Here's the long-awaited series flyer to hand out to promote the races.

It's here (colour). and here (b&w) We've been busy organising stuff and developing the race entry and scoring system.  Computers will not be used! Scoring will be done on paper. No computer crashes will ruin our days!

Trek Australia are providing the series with a Trek T1 track frame as the major prize for the series.

Additionally, a pair of Bontrager Race-Lite tyres as a prize for daily aggregates is also on offer.

I've had a fair bit of enthusiastic feedback thus far about this series.  I've had interest from Bendigo, some of the Blackburn sprinters (Barry Woods, Andrew Steele etc) and a number of members of other clubs have expressed some desire to compete.

Ed Wilson from Bendigo suggested that we have a series entry as an option, and it's not a bad idea but I'm not sold on it yet. It gets hard if we have washouts (it can rain in Melbourne in summer!) and if someone misses a round, for example do we refund them?  Do I have to keep a bag of cash for this? My feeling is no, entries on the day only.  I understand that if you're going to come over to Blackburn from Bendigo that you'd want to be sure of a place, that's easy, arrive at 11:30 on the dot when we open entries. 

He was also unsure of the target market - to clarify - this series is aimed at non-elite track sprinters.  If Jobie Dajka or Shane Kelly turn up we'll be thrilled, but since payday is not going to be more than $50 for first place, I doubt this would interest them all that much. This is mainly for 'the rest of us' who want to do match sprinting.  We'll have three grades and a partial round robin - the emphasis is therefore on participation and practice moreso than a pathway to the AIS squad.  I certainly don't have the experience to run a series of that nature and I doubt that we'd be able to be as professional as that would require.  We also expect that races will be raced in a well mannered way and I'm trying to come up with an idea for how to ensure that riders conduct themselves in the spirit of the sport.

That said, I expect the standard to be reasonably high - we'll have three grades, A to C, and this isn't aimed at complete novices.