Finish Line of Cycling Event

clockwerkzMember

I've been asked to help out with timing the finish line of a bike event. The race is 240km long and it's done in a team/relay format. The finish line is quite manageable with finishers normally coming across in singles or pairs. Occasionally there are packs of 8 or 10 riders.

I can either use a thumb-button plunger to trigger finish impluses, or I could set up a photo-cell. My question is, if I use a photo-cell at the finish, should it be set up to catch the leading edge of the front wheel of the bikes? Will a front wheel trigger a cell or is it too narrow? Alternately I could set the cell at a height above the handle-bars and catch the riders at torso-height?

Also any suggestions on settting the lock-out time for the cells? (So that the cells are not triggered by multiple wheels and tubes on the bikes.)

This isn't exactly a top-level competition, so we don't care about precision to 1/100th of a second. (It's typically been timed manually in the past.) No photo-finish equipment is available.

Any advice would be great.

Thanks!

6/9/085:39 PM

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allancoppockMember

I would use a plunger to trigger the impulses. A person can easily distinguish between two or more close finishes whereas a photo cell is essentially "dumb". We have been using a plunger for years with Mt Bike events with no significant problems. We usually have a video camera running at the finish (usually with the display clock in the picture) and if any confusion arises, it isn't a big deal to review the tape and see what really happened. After doing hundreds of MTB events, I think we have had to go back and look at the film only twice, and in both cases it confirmed the result from the guy on the plunger.

6/11/087:14 AM

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mikesMember

Havn't visited for a while.
Let me tell you about bike race timing rules, Riders must have a full second gap before a new time is given From the rear of the last rider in a bunch to the front of the wheel of the next rider must be a full second or they both get the same time,
the 1/10 ths are dropped so the timing resolotion is 1 second. In a really big field it is possible to have 60 riders together with the same credited time and have a 1 second gap giving the 1st person after a gap 10 or more seconds later than a guy that was only 1 second in front.
Time trials are timed to the 1/100 and the parts of a second are only used to break ties and to create rankings.

6/14/0810:20 PM

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