Road and Track licence points

[Roy Gardiner]

[John McC]

No, the one above that, you clown

What is needed is a system where good endurance track riders will get enough points from their track racing to prevent them, when racing in the odd road event, from being allowed to race in the "easier" (say 2nd/3rd cats) events, which would be most unfair for the other competitors.

Those who advocate separate points for road and track, or even no points for track consistently fail to recognise in their argument that most good endurace trackies, generally ride a few road events. We must have a category/points system that addresses this fact.
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John McClelland's victory in the motor paced event with Derek Marloe on the derny was a thing of beauty (Oldmanof)

[George Gilbert]

In which case I refer you to my earlier post

[John McC]

And
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John McClelland's victory in the motor paced event with Derek Marloe on the derny was a thing of beauty (Oldmanof)

[Roy Gardiner]

[George Gilbert]

[John McC]

[John McC]

[Bally]

[George Gilbert]

[John McC]

No it affected the As just as much.
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John McClelland's victory in the motor paced event with Derek Marloe on the derny was a thing of beauty (Oldmanof)

[Thomo]

[George Gilbert]

[John McC]

[Thomo]

[Thomo]

[BryanTaylor]

It's not ideal at the moment, but the difficulty is finding a solution that will actually improve it rather than create new problems.

Ideal solution would be to scrap categories altogether & have age related racing along with a novice adult category, & the grading for senior events based on the standing of the event. But this will never happen in Britain because there aren't enough riders in youth\junior categories to have a calendar that avoids the need for the better ones to ride with seniors, & because most riders are coming into it from non-cycling or leisure riding as adults, not through racing as youths, so the mentality is not to want to improve as high as possible, but to race for pleasure at a level that doesn’t involve having to train hard & make any sacrifices to reach a high level. That’s apparent by the field sizes in events – if an organiser runs 2 events, the 3rd cat race will generally be full up & the E12 struggle for entries despite a higher prize list & status, whereas when I started, we'd always make a point of riding a higher level race every 3-4 events so we'd have an idea what to expect when we moved up a cat.

I’ve been top of the elite rankings a few times from mostly track & crits, I stopped doing much road because of the travelling involved to find a race open to elite – easier & more enjoyable to go to Belgium instead for a w\end to do road. Top of the rankings means little in any category, as well as the split between road & track, often it depends who lives in a part of the country that runs a lot of BC events. This is partly why one of the new 2007 BC rules for youth riders is a complete joke, where again they’ve managed to lump road & track together into one solution without thinking the two separate issues through, so all it will do as it stands is prevent people from riding (I’ve already emailed Paul to politely complain about it).

Track is difficult in that it’s closely linked to road, there aren’t many MTB riders who also race road every week, but many track endurance riders do. There's no real need for track to have points, other than to try & put a rider in the right category for road – Nat Champs should in theory tell who the best road\track\crit riders are, & it’s not hard for organiser to work out who is an A & who is a B rider in track leagues, & in an open meet there’s nothing stopping a rider being moved up or down. So scrapping track points completely might initially mean a few riders are ranked lower than their ability for road, but this shouldn’t last very long & there’s no reason why they couldn’t ask for a higher category licence. But if points are scrapped completely & track entries drop, then organisers won’t risk losing money promoting again, & we’ll be left with no track events other than midweek leagues which then means the facilities become underused & we start losing tracks again.

So, unless we can get away with the mindset of riding track to get points, then best to leave it as it is, scrapping points for events under 3km was probably the best solution to avoid sprinters who can’t make it up the first hill in a road race, not end up as 1st cats & to cut down a little on track points that can be won. But are there really many riders these days who do track to get points rather than because they enjoy it? Most road riders seem to want to be 2nd cats, so they don’t have to travel miles to find a race, & I don’t see many B riders desperate to move up to A in TL's or Opens. Another possible tweak could be to split road & track points so rankings are more meaningful, but just 2 cats on track, not the 5 we have on road (which is at least 1 too many), then maybe the riders who are swayed by points, might still do track to try & be ranked high there.

Would you do less track if there were no points John (or anyone)?.

[John McC]

No, I wouldn't do less track, but I'd end up with so few points, I could enter a few local easy chipper road races and earn some easy cash
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John McClelland's victory in the motor paced event with Derek Marloe on the derny was a thing of beauty (Oldmanof)

[Bally]

I think the situation is different now than 1993 because more riders want to do track - which is probably a side effect of a) having the indoor velodromes available for racing and training and b) our top riders are now amongst the best in the world (which in itself is a by product of a) amongst other things). We could therefore probably scrap points for track altogether and it won't have too much of a detrimental affect on entries (at least I hope not).

Or keep the track points but have separate rankings so organisers can plan their events more easily if they have riders entered they are unfamiliar with.

But then you've still got the problem of cross overs riders so as has been suggested before, maybe have some sort of system that where a riders road license partially reflects their track perfomances (and vice versa)?
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Bally: Putting the @rse into Grass.
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[xixang]