GoldRiver regularity hillclimb - A proposal…

not lost in the outback

Ambitions continue to fuel visions of what further kinds of motorcycle motorsports could be responsibly included in a Motorcycle Week in Gold River.

Let’s not get carried away with grand ideas, this is strictly a small potatoes enterprise for non-expert motorsporticians and to a degree, participants need to be protected from themselves and their designs on glory…

Event design brief:

• The event must be road legal

• The event must provide a scorable competition

• The event must be reasonably near GR

• The event must be appropriate to non-expert motorcycle motorsport enthusiasts

• The event must be manageable with a minimum of infrastructure resources and those resources must be within the reach of event organisers

• The event venue must be reasonably safe, ie controllable for traffic, not feature reasonably foreseeable hazards such as precipitous drops, high bridges, deep water

• The event course must be steep and twisty/bumpy enough to minimise riders speed while not being so steep that it is very difficult or impossible to get up.

• The venue must be sufficiently far away from areas of habitation so as to be unlikely to be a cause for annoyance.

• Event participants must be holders of full motorcycle driving licences, hold valid road motor insurance and their machines must be registered as road vehicles.

So ok! Let’s do a hillclimb!!!

Hillclimb, along with Sprinting and Drag form the two non-race, speed events in motor sport.

They are defined as drivers (riders) competing to cover a given course in as short a time as possible.

Given the combination of “competition” and “speed”, the potential for risk is as high as in most other forms of motorsport and successful participation requires expertise. Measures must be in place to mitigate against novice riders having situations get ahead of them.

An unmodified, speed hillclimb would be an invitation for problems to spoil what would be intended to be a fun experience.

So how can the obvious risks be mitigated…?

You might have heard of Bracket Racing. https://www.onallcylinders.com/2012/06/22/bracket-racing-101-learn-basics-then-get-out-race/

Bracket racing is a form of drag racing where drivers and riders compete to see who can get as close to their predicted pass times down a drag strip, not who can complete a pass down the strip in the shortest time. The hyperlink above will take you to a website that explains how car bracket racing on a drag strip works.

If the principle of attempting to get as close as possible to a target time rather than being “the fastest” is applied to a hillclimb and using the GPS timing system currently in use, a competition format that fulfills the design brief begins to present itself…

First, find your hill…

There are some possible hills close to Gold River. Gravel FSRs, no longer than 2km, blind-ended for traffic control purposes. About 5km away from habitations and not in use by industrial traffic at the event time.

A format could be that riders make three (or four) passes up the hill.

A start and finish line are set on the hill and an arbitrary timing time using Richta GPS rally timing be set.

Each rider makes an initial run up the hill AT THEIR OWN PREFERRED PACE to set their target index time. This personal datum serves as the standard to which each rider endeavours to match on two or possibly three subsequent passes.

The arbitrary Richta target time serves as the standard to which riders passes generate a time score. Say the “route” is two kilometers long and the Richta speed is arbitrarily set at 60Kph. Probably an impossible speed to match, but that doesn’t matter.

2km at 60Kph will obviously take 120 seconds - 2 minutes.

If rider A takes 3minutes and 30 seconds to complete the climb for the first time their “index score” would be 90. 90 seconds slower than the arbitrary reference time.

If rider B takes 5 minutes to complete the climb, they will record an index score of 180. 180 seconds slower than the arbitrary reference time.

Now riders A and B take two more runs at the hill and their times are recorded and compared to their index scores. The winner is the rider who can most closely match their subsequent passes to their initial time.

Details such as traffic management on the hill, communication between the start and finish lines, consequences of falling on the hill will need to be decided in advance but are not insurmountable. Questions of class divisions would also need to be asked and answered,

If there is sufficient interest in this, a test event could be run with a restricted entry list to try it out.

Comments, suggestions and observations are invited either as a comment to this blog post, by email to Jonathan@gr200.com or as a social media comment.