I totally agree with seperating road and MTB seeding. This is my idea of some changes that they could give a try for the seeding structure (for road events) I first started to type a letter how there is a bottleneck at groups F through to I. But I then decided to rather look at most of the PPA road races for the last season to make sure that I am getting my facts straight. I didnt use the burger or other races that use a different seeding to the ppa one. I also only looked at the long routes of races. I went through 10 races from this last season for this. I used 6 league and 4 normal funrides (10 in total). (I have this in a excel spreadsheet now, PM me your email address if you want to see it) What I did is I pulled the number of people who started in each group. EL, SV, MS, WL, SS, A, B, etc. I didnt use tandems as the field could be split up to much and the numbers are very low as well. If there was more than one group that started together I split the numbers up. If the numbers didnt split evenly I would make a guesstimate on how to split the numbers as you cant have a half a person starting in a group. For the league sections I would split their numbers into the groups where they most probably are indexed at. I know that this was not totally acurate as people do often start in lower groups to where they are seeded and also I dont know everybodies seeding from league. But it will give us a pretty good understanding of what the group sizes are, especially if you look at the trend over a few races. And this is what I have found. (Biggest to smallest) Overall sizings (Average of league and normal funrides) B A N K I D H P M L J C G O F E Q R S W T U X V Z Y League B A D K I N H C G F L E M J P O Q R S W T X U V Z Y Funrides N P K M I Q O J H L R B G F S C V U A T D W X Y Z E Remember for the normal funrides, a lot of people that ride league will not attend the normal rides. Looking at those results it is pretty clear what ppa was trying to do with the pretty big adjustment of the seeding structure at the beginning of the last season. Groups A,B are very large still. The frustration that I am feeling back in group G when we meet up with another group and we have 100 riders fighting for the 3 meters of tarmat must be so much worse up in league as I can see that their starting group numbers can range from 70 to 90 people at the start of the race. NO WONDER people are getting disqualified at every league funride. How on earth can you expect to fit that many people into one small section of road? I dont know how it is to race league so we would need some feedback from other people that do ride it here on this topic. I dont know if it would be better to seperate it into two different EL groups or what. Maybe they need more age seperators in there. (well if they want to change how it works) The only thing that I can see from the numbers is that it may be good to join the MS with the WL as both have fairly low numbers (less than 20). They normally have fairly similar race times so I think that they could work well together. They could still race as two cats, but they should be allowed to help each other and it will also help freeing up 5 minutes on the start. From what I can see here, is they probably need to do even more splitting up and I would say that they should seed people all the way down to Y rather. So we can get a better spread. The can have Z1,2,3,4 or something as new cats. Rather have more, smaller starting groups. They currently have two base events that they use as 0 seeding events (unadjusted winning times for winners) That is the Argus and 94.7. They should as a minimum use all of the events on the Alpha Pharm Seeding Series as base events and if a person has completed more than one of these events then his index should be averaged across them. (All of these events are pro events and prize money etc, meaning that all the top pros ride all of these) We need to even take it a step further. Lets say that if an event has had 500+ finishers and if the winners of the race are in the "A+ group" of the averaged out seeding then surely no rider would have been able to have ridden a better race. Hense the winning time should not be adjusted. ie. You get Malcolm Lange winning the westcoast express, where there is 500+ riders and pro teams. No rider in the country would have made a better time over the distance so why change the time. If we go to a small race ie. The westcoast national park (Langebaan). It is unlikely that a pro teams would ride the race and normally at a small non-league event the numbers are going to be fairly low. You will then need to look at the winners and take a look at their averaged out seeding (which would probably only be a "lower grade A or B) and hense adjust the race time back to where you can see a A+ rider finishing it in correlation to the base seeding. In this kind of model we would most probably see that league events are not adjusted at all. Yes, this will have a knock on effect that most riders will have a slightly better seeding than they should. The bigger guys will benifit more from the rolling hills while the skinny boys will pick up their better times from the hard hill's. What will then be needed is to make all of the groups smaller. Even if it is cut back quite drastically, people will at least be able to move back into their correct seedings because there is no longer any (or much) adjusting happening. We do have another problem though. You get three kind of people riding races. 1. The kind that are moving up. 2. The kind that are just staying where they are 3. The kind that are unfit and should be moving down. As people can upgrade their seedings they will move into a group which better suites their speed. But there are also people in that group that preformed really well last or two seasons ago that are now not up to form and they are just there in the group taking up space. They will probably get dropped halfway in the race anyway. We need a system that can reseed the entire field maybe 4 times a year or something so that we dont get 10's of extra people squashing into a group where there are slackers that need to get moved down a few again. Each race from a two season's ago would get the normal 5% penalty. People will still be able to upgrade, but at least the slackers will get moved down quicker. How are we going to manage that? I dont know, maybe we need a membership structure where you only join for the season. They can chop the membership fees down then as well because it will be for 3 months or so at a time. It surely doesnt cost alot to print numbers, so this will be possible. (And we will be paying for it anyway) This is just a wack idea, but tell me what you guys think. There is always problems with running a league event and a funride event on the same course at the same time and treating it as the same event. It works better for the normal funrides where you have your A-Z cats only as it probably makes things simpler logistically. What if they had to do away with the league cats and make the long route of funrides the league race. Hense, the league rides have to start in the ABC's groups. Then, there will also be no late entries for the long routes. Everybody that wants to ride the long routes will need to enter league and you will then have your entry into the races for the season. Even if you are a P rider there must still be cats from A to Z. They can even give a big discount as having the people pre-entering will secure race and prize money for the different races. For the people that dont want to pre-enter ahead will need to ride the short routes or they will need to pay a prorata rate for the rest of the races in the season. Alot of riders ride most of the races in a season, so this could save them some money as well. Oh yes, before I forget. They must have a seeding system for the road and mtb. But lets say you only have the one (road) and you go do a mtb race, then you should get a 10% penalty on your mtb seeding until you do another mtb race to seed you correctly. It should also work like that the other way around as well. Anyway, thats a big chunk to set your teeth into. Post your comments guys!
