Race (Attempt) Report

Many thanks to the organizers, to DEKRA (who owns the race-track, esp. the nice lady at the gate) and the officials, it was a very impressive and informative race-weekend.

Took part at the race with a special Milan SL-velomobile with an extra portion of technical solutions, later on that more (technical report).
Running out of time with those special details, so I missed the extra-long test rides.
I had to cancel the Cyclevision (Nederlands) and a 720km-Brevet in Switzerland.
The attempt started out of these reasons with a bad touch...

Warming up on Friday evening was for many participants difficult, because of the plenty of flat tyres (due to extreme high pressures). Before sunset I rode three laps with a max. of 48km/h and app. 190Watt. I was swearing and thinking, what is going wrong? Coming back to the pit-stop people told me I rode laps with 61 and 62 km/h. Yes, I mixed the wheel circumference from front (20") to rear (26")... Solution: drinking a beer to cool down.

Saturday morning started a bit unorganized, because I had to do last modifications at the vehicle. The first two hours of the race in the morning coolness (I started 09:45am) were real fun. Just let the velomobile run through the laps with an average of 58km/h. Then I reduced my speed because of the increasing heat, there was no chance and need to follow Christian and Wulf (both with Milan SL).

Around 05:00pm, after 7 hours with an average of 53km/h my speed droped down extremely (laps with 44km/h). I reached the pit-stop with ague, I felt im my cabin like a BBQ. 30min stop and removing the hood, I rode 90min to cool my body. The problem without hood is a speed-decrease of 4km/h, so at 07:00pm we put the hood back on my velomobile and till 0:00 I rode 5hours with an average of 50km/h.

At 00:20am, 14h19min riding time, 114 laps each with 5,83km and an total average of 46,4km/h I abandoned the attempt. I didn´t see my goal of 48km/h.

Till that point I recognized my problems, learned a lot and decided to save my rescources for an other attempt.

The time after following the race of Christian, Charly and Andreas was very interesting, recognizing details and strategies.
On Sunday morning after the attempts we compared my velomobile with similar vehicles because of the heating and cooling. What a surprise, the silver coated film on my Milan was not as good reflecting sunenergy than the yellow gelcoat of the others. The grey-particles of my film were absorbing a lot of heat...
Why not recognizing this before? We applied the film two weeks before and since that we had cool weather conditions...
Now we have to analyze, discuss and improve many of our ideas and mistakes for the next time.

The wonderful thing of this velomobile is the road capability by removing all the race-specific parts.

See you somewhere in the alps ;-)
Harald Meckelburg