Saturday Hiwinui Graded Race Feb 4 2012

Today we trialled for Andrew his timing system. And as the racers started to arrive they saw electronic timing mats being laid on the start line and all wondered if they had come to the right start line. For a club race it was a first and although the results from Andrew will come through at a later date it was all very interesting to see how far technology has come. For those that participated Andrew was doing a comparison between 2 sorts of timing chips, the paper ones that were wrapped around the seatpost and the orange ones that were cable tied on to the front fork. And if you took note of the paper timing chip they were from the Santos Great Bike Ride Rotary Club of Perth.  Hope the trial worked well for you Andrew.

This was the first race of the season and a few new things were introduced behind the scenes to make club racing a bit easier for all involved.

Volunteers had been called for prerace and all jobs were assigned before the race. The roles and responsibilities of the race manager had been printed out ( Mark Waterland ) which detailed race briefing for riders and marshals. Race map had been printed out detailing where marshals were to be and what signs were required at each point. Marshals were then able to take the signs out to where they were directed.

Today was a little bit disorganised because of people changing grades, not preregistering and of course the addition of the additional timing tags. But overall I felt it was a good start to the racing season.

Special thanks to Mark (race manager) Suzanne Winterburn and Max Annear-Henderson for marshalling, Kim Findlay and others who helped recording results and timing.

It was good to have a few new faces along. We hope the newbies enjoyed the race course today and will join us again in the future. We did have a number of our regular riders missing today and we hope to see them all back again racing soon.