Sportive

‘World’s longest one-day race’ takes places in Great Windsor Park

Inaugural Red Bull Timelaps saw 536 riders race over 25 hours as the clocks go back

When the clocks go back, most of us are looking forward to an extra hour in bed. Not so at the inaugural Red Bull Timelaps event, which took advantage of the extra hour during the early hours of Sunday 29 November to lay claim to being the “world’s longest one day road cycling race”, with teams of four riding for 25 hours.

The event, which saw 536 riders compete in a feat of overnight endurance, was won by the Wellingborough Cycles team, who collectively managed to complete an impressive 138 laps of the 6.6km closed circuit. That result also meant the team won the under-25 category by a full nine laps.

The event took place on a rolling 6.6km circuit in Great Windsor Park

“We are ecstatic,” said team leader Jack Patmore. “We ended up entering as a bit of fun at the end of our season, so it’s really great that we ended up winning the whole event. We didn’t really have a game plan apart from just letting one of the guys hit it really hard. We will definitely be back next year to defend our title.”

The event proved to be a both a physical and mental challenge for teams, who had to contend with the obvious challenge of riding overnight, plus the extra ‘Tag Heuer Power Hour’ as the clocks switched from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time. This took the form of a shorter course within the confines of Windsor Great Park, where each lap was counted twice to help teams boost their overall lap count.

Tactics were a hot topic of discussion once the event had finished, thanks to the rule that only one rider from each team was allowed on the course at any one time.

Sophie Edmondson (riding for the women’s category winners Team 5th Floor), said: “In the beginning, our tactics were [to do] short stints at the beginning, then after lap four, we realised we needed to extend this. For the power hour we did six lap stints, in the night we did eight and then we did three each for the last ones.”

The Red Bull Timelaps took advantage of the extra hour to lay claim to being the ‘world’s longest one-day bike race’

Team Tekkerz’s Alec Briggs added: “Next year we are going to come back for more. We didn’t end up sticking to our tactics – we wanted to do three hours each, but quickly realised we wouldn’t be able to do that. [We’re] gutted we didn’t win overall but looking forward to coming back stronger next year”.

For the full list of results, head over to uk.redbull.com/timelaps