Originally Posted by spokenword
I believe the point is to discourage it from being a team time trial. If a team starts to focus on its speed, then there's a greater temptation to drop members who, for various reasons, might be holding the team back, even if they might be riding at a pace that allows them to complete the course in the prescribed time.
So, if say, the restriction were dropped, and you rode in a team of 5 all with a goal of doing it in 18 instead of 24 hours; what would you do if one of your team members had digestion issues and needed to spend more time in a control bathroom? What if the best average speed they could muster was 12 mph? Would you drop him? You still had four members and can still finish the fleche without him.
But the idea behind the fleche is not to drop him, and, if at all possible, to finish the ride as a team. By taking the speed criteria away, you eliminate a large source of possible inequity amongst various team members. If you want to make a fleche more challenging, you can do things like pick hillier terrain, opt for a weird start time, or do it all fixed. Yet, at the end, you still have a common goal, which is to finish.
I see your point, but why not just require that the team must finish together as a whole, but then eliminate the speed restriction so that the teams can ride it as fast (or as slow!) as they want? That way if the friend has digestive issues, the team has to wait for him, but on the other hand, if everyone's feeling good and strong the whole time and can achieve a 20-hour finish time, they can.
My whole point is this - there might be some racers out there (TT'ers, in particular) that are thinking about getting into some longer distances, and thus randoneuring. The Fleche might be an appealing starting point because of the team aspect, and if it were allowed to run as I've suggested, they could still treat it kind of like a race, which they like. After they get a taste though, they might start thinking about solo 200ks, 300ks, etc. They don't have speed restrictions on those, right? So why on the Fleche, where you could more reasonably go faster because of the pack factor?
Anyhoo, I'm not going to belabor the point, as I'm not even part of the randoneuring community (just have some friends that are). I admire the hell out of all you guys for the distances you're able to put in, and truth be told that speed restriction probably wouldn't be a problem for me.
I just find it curious is all...