Support road.cc

Like this site? Help us to make it better.

news

Come and ride the world's smallest velodrome in London!

Red Bull's Minidrome is built and ready for action on 15 January...

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.

If you don't want to ride but fancy catching the action then there's a capacity of 500 for spectators. Admission is free but donations to the campaign to save Herne Hill Velodrome will be taken. (http://www.savethevelodrome.com). We'll be venturing down for a special early doors go on the track before qualifying starts, so stay tuned for news on that. Assuming the local A&E has WiFi.

Dave is a founding father of road.cc, having previously worked on Cycling Plus and What Mountain Bike magazines back in the day. He also writes about e-bikes for our sister publication ebiketips. He's won three mountain bike bog snorkelling World Championships, and races at the back of the third cats.

Add new comment

4 comments

Avatar
Tony Farrelly | 13 years ago
0 likes

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.

Avatar
bazzargh | 13 years ago
0 likes

'kloides' is most likely the 'street math' term for 'cycloids'.

Used to hang out with the wrong cantor set in my youth.

Avatar
bazzargh replied to bazzargh | 13 years ago
0 likes

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)

Avatar
cat1commuter | 13 years ago
0 likes

I'd like to see a madison event on that.

Latest Comments