Originally Posted by
furiousferret
When you're 240 and your niche is sprinting any circuit with an elevation gain over 10 can be problematic.
You could make that 180, depending on the height of the rider.
Also a sprinter would probably like a tiny bit of elevation gain. What goes up must come down. A sprinter that has to make a 20 second effort to make it up a short steep hill can then relax for a bit as gravity helps him. Problematic only if there is more than one hill every, say, 2 minutes. For me that's ideal.
I find flat courses hard because you can't really take it easy anywhere. A course with a little hill (20 seconds or less), much easier.
I had a short conversation with another racer about promoting. He was interested in doing a crit local to him, on city streets. He asked me budget range for holding a crit.
"Bethel, like $6k a week, because it's in an industrial park. I know that two downtown crits, A and B, were $25-30k. The old C Crit got canceled because police costs went to $25k."
"Oh, okay, so I'll need to look at something like $25k."
"???"
As a promoter I don't want to look for sponsors. I also don't want to lose money. Bethel cost just a touch over $6k a week to hold. I don't think that my "race for racers"* philosophy works well for anything more complicated than an industrial park. To cover $25k expenses… that would be really stressful. If the race gets 400 racers that's over $60 entry each! An expensive race gets less racers. More racers if it's cheaper but then it's 600 racers at $40. And those numbers are $1k short.
Bethel typically gets 250-300 racers. Big would be 400. Huge races in the area are 500-550 racers, Bethel has never had that.
*to be fair that wasn't my saying, it was one of the original founders of the Bethel Spring Series, but it's the philosophy I've embraced.