{"id":3588,"date":"2026-08-14T13:37:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T12:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/?p=3588"},"modified":"2026-08-14T13:37:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T12:37:32","slug":"national-12-hour-championships-forecast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/discussion\/national-12-hour-championships-forecast\/","title":{"rendered":"National 12 hour championships forecast"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On Sunday the 16th of August the RTTC National 12 hour time trial championships will be held in Monmouthshire on the R12\/16 course. The first riders roll out at 6:01 and will be on the gas for the following 12 hours, completing as many laps of the course as they can in that time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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12 hour TT courses can be a little harder to model performance on seeing as we don’t know exactly what laps the rider will do. Typically, this decision is made on the ground by the race director as to which part of the course riders use due to conditions on the road and other logistical considerations. Obviously, the part of the course with the big hill in it is most likely slower, so if riders spend more time on there than the flat bit, their modelled speed will be slower too. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Weather <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A 12 hour time trial is quite a bleak endeavour, even for the most enthusiastic riders there’s always at least one portion of the race that leaves you questioning why you entered. Nothing would accelerate that moment quite like the freezing cold and the rain, however conditions appear to be on the side of the participants this year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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myWindsock’s weather panel has precipitation at 0 throughout the event, with a patch of rain moving in at 8pm. If that comes early it could make the last hour quite unpleasant, but by that point in a 12 hour time trial, it’s all unpleasant anyway. On top of the precipitation, the wind forecast is low throughout most of the day but it also picks up a little in the last hour, though 5.8m\/s is not a particularly high wind speed. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Elevation Profile <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One of the toughest things about a long time trial is the back breaking work of spending 12 hours in the TT bars. Every time you sit up, you lose a couple of metres from your result. Steeper hills and low wind speed sections can give riders the opportunity to sit up without paying a penalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unfortunately for these riders, there’s limited opportunities to get out the saddle. Even though the elevation profile is rolling, it would appear that none of these climbs are particularly steep providing limited opportunities to sit up without losing time. On the other hand, this can help during a 12 hour TT as high torque efforts come with muscular damage that feels absolutely dreadful in the second half of the race. A practical take away for riders is they should sit up during the parts of the course they’re travelling their slowest on. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As you may have noticed from the graphs, myWindsock has a new look thanks to our surface platform, which is currently under development. One new feature of this is we can write extensions, which are small snippets of code in a “high level” language called Lua. A high level language is one that’s reasonably close to written english, making the syntax easily decipherable such that learning to write these extensions can be done by anyone curious enough to try. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An example of extensions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We can use these extensions to take a look at the average speed changes as a rider sits up more or less frequently. Setting up a time interval, we can see what happens to the average speed if our rider sits up for 60s at the following intervals (for an 80kg system mass with an “in position” cda of 0.23 riding at 240W)… <\/p>\n\n\n\n