At Hellyer Park Velodrome, the Wednesday night series is the starting point for many new racers. It doesn’t have the prestige of Friday nights or the specialization of the sprint or points race series, but it offers more race nights per year than anything else.
Racing is done in A/B/C groups, rather than by category, and juniors figured in each group. Joel Shaffer placed 7th of 18 “C” riders in his first night on the track. Not impressed yet? His racing age is 13, and most of the riders were adult men.
In the 16-rider “B” group, Matt Mosby was 2nd, Kelly LaFleur 5th, and Kim LaFleur tied for 8th. In “A”s, Daniel Holloway took 2nd.
I wasn’t there to take any pictures, but perhaps I’ll get some tonight when I drop by the weekly points races, which also start this week.
I just added a new track to the Velodrome Locator and the address list. It’s not actually new - I just learned about it.
The velodrome is an old auto track, so it has an unusual shape and shallow banking. Check it out.
An aerial view from Google Maps:
By the way, anyone finding missing or incorrect information in the locator or address list is invited to leave a comment with the correct information. The site will be updated appropriately - and quickly if possible.
Turn 4, Tuolumne
This post is a test of embedding photos hosted at www.flickr.com in my articles. I’m hoping that by keeping the images there, overall site response will be faster.
The image shows a small Cat 4/5 pack at the Tuolumne Township Crit. The riders in the red and yellow LGBRC/Easton/Specialized kit are in fact junior track riders. The lead rider is a junior as well. It seems that the “grownups” just wanted to sit in the back and wait for a final sprint, while the juniors were willing to attempt breaks, develop tactics they can use in higher-level races, and generally keep things interesting.
[Added 2/13/2006] Flickr doesn’t limit your lifetime uploads and doesn’t technically delete them. What it does do is gradually hide your older photos once you exceed a certain limit. They might as well be deleted, unless you pay for a “Pro” account or delete some of the new pictures.
If there is no photo to the left, Flickr has hidden it. Because of this “feature” I am removing Flickr-linked photos from all other articles, but I’ll leave this one as a test.
We had another fun junior session for the 10-14 crowd today. We had 13 riders in spite of a small river running across the access road and predicted rain showers. The biggest group was the Wolfpak triathlon club, but we had other new and returning riders as well.
Today we did a number of short scratch and points races with subsets of the group. We usually emphasize less competitive drills, but junior districts is early this year and we wanted to give the riders some experience with how those events work.
Big thanks to the Santa Clara County rangers for helping us arrange alternate access to the track today.
Local racing is starting for the adults and the juniors who are ready to ride with them, so there should be more news and photos soon.
