News

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East Surrey Hardriders

Sunday saw the second round of the club's TT series, the East Surrey Hardriders time trial. As well as points towards the season-long competition, Sunday's time trial is also the club's "Circuit Race Championship" and the fastest club member on the day was Phil Ember who wins the Pinta Shield for a year. The club's riders also won the team prize, thanks to Steve Irwin and Ben Elliott. The race was won by Wouter Sybrandy (Sigma Sport RT).

Website news

The club's website's is roughly seven years old now, writes James Beaumont. The site started the website back in 2003 with help from former member Martin Webber. When launched the design at the time was pretty flash, all the work was done by ex-Wheeler Andy Ward and his OTMBrand.com business (Andy's behind PredictorPro.com too). It was a static site, you could read information about the club but the content never changed. In time the website grew, first with the arrival of a news page, then the forum was born and in recent times it's branched out via Twitter and doing online membership applications.

Now the site gets around 500 unique visitors a day, a figure that rises beyond a thousand in the summer months, surprisingly the site is more popular with non-members than members. Many come to snoop around the forum but google sends a lot of traffic, with people searching for predictable things like a "south west london cycling club" but also for articles on the Marmotte, ways to prevent cramp or the Introducing interviews.

During the years many photos have been sent into the news page. Most of these have been kept on the kingstonwheelers.com server across a few folders and I've put all the photos from the main directory into a short film that's now hosted over on youtube. They're not all the photos, but most are there. A few appear twice because they've been used in different articles or pages. Click here to view the film over on youtube.

Looking to the future now and a new webmaster is being groomed over the internet. Alan Sherman will be taking over this website in due course but I'll be still be running things on a joint-basis whilst Alan gets used to things.

Club Time Trial Series

2010 Series Events

The ranking events for the club's 2010 Time Trial Series are as follows:

21 Feb	Redhill Sporting	18 miles
7 Mar	East Surrey Hardriders	29.9 miles
24 Apr	Kingston Phoenix RC	10 miles
16 May	High Wycombe CC	25 miles
13 Jun	Team Axiom	25 miles
18 Jul	West London CA	50 miles
31 Jul	Charlotteville CC	10 miles
29 Aug	Alton CC	25 miles
11 Sep	A3 CRG	10 miles
26 Sep	Epsom CC	25 miles

Points are awarded, from 10 down to 1, for the first 10 riders in each event. Your best seven rides will count for the trophy so you don't have to ride every event. Indeed the Redhill CC's 19.4 mile time trial was scrapped on Sunday. This was to be the first round but the heavy rain and ice in parts meant it was nul points for all. The next round is the East Surrey Hardriders 30 miler. For full details on the series, click here.

Sorensen and Bagnall Move Up

Congratulations to Lise Sorensen and Emily Bagnall for their third and fourth place respectively on Saturday in the East London Vélo races at Hog Hill. Thanks to these high finishes both riders move up to third category.

Photo: Imperial RT Hillingdon Winter Series

William James Platt finished second overall in the Hillingdon Winter Series for the third category riders. Indeed he was leading the standings but was promoted up to second category before the series ended, meaning he could not defend his lead in the final round, leaving Alan Strang (Dulwich) to claim the top spot on the podium.

Surrey League Road Races

The club is promoting two races for the Surrey League on Sunday 14 March. Following the annual format the racing will be on lanes near Dunsfold, with a third category race in the morning and then one for second and third category riders in the afternoon. One change is that Jim Ley and Maryka Sennema are taking over as race organisers with previous organiser James Beaumont having moved to Geneva. Another change is that the race will have motorcycle marshals from the NEG to help with the safety on the day.

As a member of the Surrey League the club has to put on two races and by extension anyone taking part in the League's races during the season should consider themselves duty-bound to help, so get involved. You can now sign up to help via the forum.

News Archive

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