RTTC National 10 Mile Championships

This coming weekend the RTTC National 10 Mile Championships are taking place on the O10/1 course near Doncaster in South Yorkshire. The women’s and junior races takes place on Saturday and the men’s race is on the Sunday. Both days the first rider is off at 10am and the riders will be on course until around 11:20 on the Saturday and 12:10 on the Sunday. The course is identical both days though the weather forecast varies slightly.

The course itself is a pretty simple out and back so the only real variation in pacing will come from wind and blow ups.

Both days are currently slated to be dry, temperate and relatively windless so our forecasts will focus mostly on which day is the fastest. We will set up the riders each day as the same, with a cda of 0.21, a system mass of 75kg and an average power of 300W then see how the time evolves across the start time of each day.

The forecast

This graph shows how the conditions evolve throughout the day. This graph shows the conditions relative to neutral weather. When the points are at -1, this means that the course is 1 second faster, 0 means the conditions are completely neutral and above zero is that many seconds slower.

There is a brief period on the Saturday where the wind makes the course marginally slower. On the Sunday, the conditions get marginally faster throughout the morning. That, alongside traffic picking up, means that conditions for the final rider should be slightly faster but barely noticeable.

The margins are tight, and both days are pretty fast. Due to the shortness of a 10 mile TT it’s not an unrealistic scenario that the podium could be split with just a handful of seconds. We should expect to see some pretty fast times though, with good conditions for racing forecast.

You can prepare for the National 10 with myWindsock here.