You’re going to be in London on 15 January anyway, aren’t you? to go to the London Bike Show? Well make sure you bring your fixed gear bike and sign up for a go on Red Bull’s most excellent Minidrome – the world’s smallest velodrome – while you’re about it. They’ve got 100 places up for grabs on the tiny boards. when the ‘drome comes to town at York Hall in Bethnal Green, just a few miles from ExCel.
If you haven’t heard of the Minidrome it’s Red Bull’s attempt to condense the thrill of track racing into a nightclub setting with a genuinely tiny track. We first head about it when they trialled it in New Zealand but the UK track is a different beast entirely, built in Germany by Velotrack, the team who built the velodromes for the Atlanta Olympics and the recent Delhi Commonwealth Games. For the track geeks it’s a ‘kloides combined with circles’ design that allows the rider to apply consistent pedal pressure and requires no steering work, which is the most modern design and also the easiest to ride. It should be easier to stay on the boards than it was on the NZ track, which was a two-semicircle design. For the record we don’t know what kloides are. The track designers claim that speeds of up to 80km/h should be possible, although of course you’d have to be certifiably insane to get even close to even half that.
The London Mini Drome is open to fixed riders of all ages, but you do have to have a bike with a track height bottom bracket – no converted road frames will be allowed as there’s too much danger of messing up the boards. To register your interest just head over to the Minidrome website and fill in the registration form top right. Entries close at 5pm on January 10, after which Red Bull will make a random draw of 100 participants, assuming more than 100 people register. Qualifying (single riders) begins at 3pm, and the fastest 32 riders will head to the knockout stages where it’s a knockout pursuit format. For a taste of what you’ll get, check out this vid of the NZ track…
Red Bull Minidrome from Eyeball Moving Image on Vimeo.
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4 thoughts on “Come and ride the world’s smallest velodrome in London!”
I’d like to see a madison
I’d like to see a madison event on that.
‘kloides’ is most likely the
‘kloides’ is most likely the ‘street math’ term for ‘cycloids’.
Used to hang out with the wrong cantor set in my youth.
Ok this is really geeky but
Ok this is really geeky but it bugged me that using a cycloid didn’t make sense in this context. The company who made this is german, and I think the bad translation of ‘Kloides’ is not from cycloids (Zykloides in german) but clothoids (Klotoides). Clothoids (aka Euler spirals, or Cornu spirals) are the solution you get if you try to make a continous transition from a straight path to a circular path – ie acceleration towards the centre of the circle increases linearly from 0 to some maximum g. More on this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_transition_curve
Bizarrely, while clothoids have been used since the mid 19th century to design smooth curves on train tracks, they’ve only been deliberately used for velodromes since Atlanta ’96 – a computer designed track made by the same people that designed Red Bull’s minidrome – who now work at worldrecordtracks.org . (See, this all made sense in the end)
Thanks Bazzarch, that makes
Thanks Bazzarch, that makes sense to me – it’s been nagging away at me ever since I wrote the original story about the mini-drome and couldn’t find anything out about kloides anywhere.