WSMTB Twilight 4hr

Some pretty warm days lead up to WSMTB's twilight round of their 4hr Summer Series. Rolling up to the foot of the Blue Mountains on the afternoon of the race and the temperature was still in the mid thirties, it was going to be a classic hot and dry Yellomundee race.

Just over 100 riders made up the teams and solos, mostly of WSMTB regulars. Club President BigDog led the starting riders to the fire-trail start chute and got the 4hr underway, then jumped on his bike to get his own race underway.

A good couple of weeks on the bike over the festive season seemed to have done wonders and our race was going well. Climbs weren't taxing and it was easy to get some flow in the fast dry conditions.

Photo: Riding Focus

Only issue was our bottle holder was working loose, we should have work out earlier why our bike was making such a racket. This slowed us down when we to remove the holder and make room for the bottle in our jersey pocket. Back on track and slowly the days temperature was dropping and lights were about to be turned on.

Up till when we stopped to remove the super loose bottle holder we had been keeping up with a couple of pairs teams, it was good pacing and company. On what might have been our last lap we trundled around and stopped to chat just before the 4hr hour in transition. We passed the results on our way to pack up and was shocked to find our name near the top of the list.

Whoops! Probably better head out for that final lap.

Thanks to the WSMTB Club for putting on a great event with a casual vibe and fast competition. 

A big shout out to JetBlack MTB Racing team and our 2015 sponsors, we managed a 1st and 3rd in the Solo Male category.

The results are available here.

L to R: CrummyMTB 3rd, Andrew Finlayson 1st, Tim Bartholomew 3nd.

Xeccon First Look

Received this nice looking lighting package from MTB Revolution during the week. But before we put it through the ringer we gave it to the work experience kid to see what the first impressions would be. Turns out we may have to employ this kid, great report Steve.

For my second ever night ride on single track, I managed to get my hands on a Xeccon Spiker 1211 helmet light and a Sogun 1100 handle bar light to play with for a couple of days. Marketed as a set on MTB Revolution’s website as ‘Xeccon D2D Lite - Performance Racing’ at a comfortable $169 it seemed like a pretty reasonable set up for a casual single-track novice like me. First impressions are that the lights and batteries are well made – small, but solid.

The straps for the helmet mounting system were a bit awkward, although it would depend on each different kind of helmet as to what would work best. I played around a bit and some of my choices allowed the light to flop around. I did manage to mount the battery on my lid as well, but it does add a bit of extra weight and is quite a task to do. Running the cable through the helmet would have prevented most of the cable flap that annoyed me on the first night ride, and it’s definitely better with the extra weight in a pocket or backpack than up top.

Sogun’s handle bar clamp system is good – although it does not open up very far to get onto the the bars and I did need a handle bar packer. (The packer would not have been an issue on my road bike’s handle bar, or most modern tapered bars). With both lights the neoprene battery pouches lacked sufficient Velcro and length to easily secure the batteries to anything but the smallest diameter tubes. My Trek 4300D has a largish, oval cross-section down tube and while not particularly massive the Sogun’s battery pouch barely made the distance. With cables on the top tube and a Garmin on the head stem, there was not much option. Even without adding length to the straps, a bit more Velcro would have made all the difference.

As for light output – I was pretty impressed. You could almost get away with low beam, but the brighter levels were really good. I had no problem seeing where I needed to go, wether it was on my own or in the middle of a bunch. The Spiker was everything I needed it to be – except for some rapid flashing for a second or so at random times. With a better mounting system it could be close to perfect. The Sogun did a good job too, but its light is not a much of a flood as I would like. If I was going to buy  my own set, I would probably fork out the extra coin for the Spiker 1210 – not so much for the extra light, but it looks like it would be more of a flood light. For a commuter and sometimes-single track light the Sogun is excellent value, but I don’t think it would suit a serious XC racer.