Location: Hillingdon circuit, London
Event: 21 December 2013
After the relative calm weather over the last two weeks, Saturday was a return to typical Winter Series conditions – rain and a strong head wind up the finishing straight. If your race strategy involved hanging in the group then you were probably going to be found out!
The Fourth Cat riders resolved to ride well again and their race was mostly attritional with a few early hard laps thinning out the field with the wind doing the rest.
Imperial’s Richard Llewellyn looked strong but it was going to be near impossible to break away with any effect. The sprint was well fought out with the win taken by Tim Lynch (Velo Club Dulwich College) with Tim O’Rourke (Twickenham CC) and Richard Llewellyn (Imperial Racing Team) in third.
James Spackman (London Dynamo) wins the Imperial Cycles random prize (28th place) and can look forward to his bike seeing in the New Year in fine fettle!
It seemed unlikely that Jake Martin (Pedal Heaven RT) could repeat his win of the previous weekend and certainly not in the same fashion. However, this he did with a show of power that decimated the field in the first few laps, going on to lap everyone including the strong group of riders who had persisted and eased away from the peloton.
This latter break was initiated by a returning Alexander King (GPM10 Cycling) and gradually formed into a group including Phil Holloway (Southend Wheelers), series contender Vince Halpern (Handsling Racing), Josh Jones (Cambridge Uni CC), Stuart Hayes (Imperial Racing Team) and Lawrence Carpenter (Catford Equipe Banks).
Whilst Martin steadily pulled away this group cemented their lead with only Carpenter able to break away in the remaining laps to finish on his own in a solid second place. Halpern won from the group to take third by a hair from King and gain some good points overall with Jerzy Kuzminski (High Wycombe) in fifth.
The top three places in the Third Category race all came from this group with Ralph De Kanter (Norwood Paragon) taking maximum points and sixth overall closely followed by James Bradley (Twickenham CC) and another third for Imperial Racing Team with Stuart Hayes thoroughly enjoying a race that he could compete in.
British Cycling would like to thank the organising team, officials and everyone else who helped promote this event. Our sport could not exist without the hundreds of people, many of them unpaid volunteers, who put in many hours of hard work running events, activities and clubs.
