The Season’s Over!

With last weekend’s Hill Climb event, the 2021 season is now over. Well, I guess there’s the matter of the New Year’s Day ‘10’ still to come…

After the abandonment of the 2020 season owing to the pandemic, it was good to have a nearly full programme of events for 2021 – barring the first four events of the calendar. We made a number of changes to how we managed the time trials for this year, chief among them was the decision to use local company ResultsBase to handle our event entries and (most of the time) to use their phone app for time-keeping. This has proven very popular, and has certainly meant much less hassle for those of us who sort out the events.

We’ve seen increased fields for most of the events this year: probably due to a couple of factors. Firstly, there weren’t actually that many competing events running for much of 2021, and secondly, using ResultsBase may have increased the visibility of our TT league.

It wasn’t all plain-sailing, however. I know that many riders (and timekeepers) found it a little hard to navigate the ResultsBase system. We had all the events set up as one big event series, and generally, the title of the individual time trial wasn’t always fully explanatory. This is something we’ll address for 2022. And sometimes the phone app gave unexpected results at the ResultsBase website.

The 2021 Timetrial Series wouldn’t have come off so successfully without the contributions of many people - not all of whom are NBRC members. I’d like to publicly thank everyone who helped out (and hopefully I won’t forget anyone).

Katja Rietdorf, Steph Cousins, Jeff Hathaway, John Reed, Chris Selley and Dick Selley all helped with timekeeping at various events.

Dick Selley took on the sign placement for pretty much all the events, and once we got rolling took care of the numbers (including retrieving the occasional numbers that went home with riders!). It shouldn’t be underestimated how big a task the sign placement is, and how important it is for events such as ours without marshals.

While Dick was managing the ‘on the day’ actions, I was making sure the ResultsBase entries opened and closed on schedule, spent time concocting the ‘results spreadsheet to end all spreadsheets’, ensuring announcements went out on the NBRC Facebook group, and that all the results were posted promptly at the NBRC website.

I’d like to thank all those who turned out to race in our events in 2021. If anything, the changed approaches to running these events has made them more fun.

Looking ahead to 2022, if there is anything I could wish for it is that we could see more input into the ‘on-the-day’ activity required to keep the time trials running through the season (from members and non-members alike). More timekeepers, some volunteers to help with sign placement, for example.