Many of us will remember the successful televised city centre races of the 1980s, sponsored initially by Kelloggs and later Scottish Provident. Well, the idea is back on the agenda, courtesy of the Tour of Britain organisation.

With 10 evening races spread over six weeks and being shown on television by ITV4, the venues included towns and cities which have either already hosted the Tour, or want to be involved as future start or finish locations.

There was also a brand new format, claimed as a world first by the organisation. For this series, the emphasis would be on teams rather than individuals. Although race winners would be presented to the spectators as you would expect, the main honours would go to the winning team on the night and also to the team leading the series overall. Points for each finisher would decide the result. The series would be contested by ten teams who would field five men from their squad in much the same way as a football manager would select his best team each week. A team had to have at least three finishers or face elimination from the whole series.

We have traditionally used two photofinish cameras on the Tour of Britain, and I planned to do the same for this series. In addition to these, our new IdentiLynx video camera would be used for the first time.

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There is a lot for one man to do on these races and I would not have the luxury of Kannan's help which I have become used to on the Tour of Britain itself. Therefore John Pearson volunteered to join me on six of the races and Trevor Jones on another one. The remaining three - I would do on my own! Exeter was the venue for the first race in the series and John was with me. It's a good job he was because my initial setup plans seemed doomed to failure. The first problem to overcome was how to position the identiLynx video camera. When we fixed it to the small tripod I normally use for it, we could not get good coverage of the approach to the finish. At John's suggestion we changed over to the heavy Manfrotto job which we would had hoped not to use. The results were perfect, but I expected some comment from Mick Bennett because we had affected the 'clean look' of the finish for TV. He did indeed comment, but it was "Great - can we have it on the Tour of Britain"!

The next hurdle was not immediately apparent. We had connected all three cameras into the network (a first for us) and they each booted first time. The trouble was that only the two photofinish cameras appeared on screen when a new file was opened, and I simply didn't know how to display them all. I do now (I think), but I was at a loss as to the way forward. John to the rescue again. He suggested we run the two Lynx cameras over the network as normal, and put the video as a stand-alone into his laptop. A great simple idea which I was blind to. This setup proved more beneficial than we first thought, because it meant that the video screen could be available all the time in case of those hard to read numbers on the photofinish. A great time saver. It just shows that two heads are better than one.

Another bonus of using the big tripod wound up to its full height was that the camera appeared just outside our window. Here's John in the big picture above adjusting it without the aid of a safety net.

Long before the end of the series we had been moved downstairs in the unit so were not able to continue this way of working. Oh well, you can't have it both ways.

 

On the left is a much clearer view of the IdentiLynx camera from our unit.

 

 

 

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Much of the race infrastructure was already familiar to us from the Tour of Britain. Same towers and gantry and a few of the large units made their regular appearance at bike racing events. Some of the units, however, were new (to us) and they were just as impressive. Not only at the time on site but when seen later on television.

What was different was the branding. New logos and colour scheme which gave the promotions an extra sense of excitement. Here's a selection of images which help to capture the atmosphere.

So how did we work? Pretty much the same as on the Tour. Trevor Hughes was Chief Judge once again, but this time there was no Séamus. His stage race results service was not needed here. Instead, the result of each race was handled by Kevin Nash on behalf of the organisation. He had developed a program to input our FinishLynx result and compile an overall points table which was then sent directly to the big screen (yes, there was one at every race).

 

We had to use two capture buttons for the photofinish and video laptops and these were inside our unit. John or Trevor Jones dealt with that side of things and I worked on the finishing places with Trevor Hughes. When the last rider had crossed the line John (or Trevor J) came and worked the video laptop to check that we were getting the identification right. It worked a treat and was really quite fast.

 

The last week of the series saw two races. Tuesday evening we were in Chester which is Trevor Jones's backyard so he worked on that race with me. At the hotel that night, Mick Bennett told me that he was planning a timetrial for ten of the riders at the final race in Southend on Thursday. Could I time it? Now we didn't have a timing computer to drive the clocks on the gantry, so I said I would do it with a camera. Next thing was HOW?

 

It had been many years since I had done anything similar so I decided to use one of our Omega timing strips and tape it down on the starting ramp. The trouble was I had to drive to John's house in Birmingham to pick one up on my way to Southend. On site in Southend I was busy soldering a new plug on the strip to fit the Lynx connection box which again I had not used for many years. Seemed to work though.

 

Riders started at two minute intervals so I saw a couple of pulses appear as each wheel crossed the tape and I just selected the first pulse from the front wheel and filmed the rider crossing the line. I could then read the time and the organisers could have their precision down to a hundredth of a second. Everyone appeared please with the way it worked, but I am just glad there were only ten riders as I was getting a bit frazzled by the end of it all.

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The format of the racing, as already explained, was team-based and relied on points being awarded to each finisher. Therefore all placings, however minor, were hotly contested. One thing I found early on in the series was we still had to keep our eye on the ball right the way through all the films.

 

On several occasions I got phone calls late into the evening asking for a recheck of the result following approaches to the judges from team managers and riders. One of these was a tight sprint for 8th/9th places at Stoke where the outcome had implications for the overall result. I have included the following large pictures of the actual photofinish followed by a blow-up of the front wheels. It was a close one just won by the Rapha Condor rider nearest the camera. At the next event I had the entire Halfords team with manager Keith Lambert in the unit to take a look for themselves. All agreed we called it right on the night, but it's nice to feel wanted!