Some may remember a post a few months back about the local council in Cheltenham building a track. Everyone seemed to think they were going to be building a national standard race track but in fact they were only going to build a small play track - something for the kids to ride round on, however once the contractor built it the council was shocked at how big it had become and while not big enough to race on it certainly will be fun to ride on.
However, loads of problems as people wanted something much bigger and better, complaints were made by a few select individuals and it has been in the local paper. We've always maintained a positive attitude to the councils attempts and worked with them highlighting the issues and the good aspects but at the end of the day it wasn't really usable and was badly built - partly due to it being built on the cheap and the weather conditions when it was built (wettest week of the year at the time). The major problem was that the parish council doesn't have any more money to redo it or bring someone in to fix it properly.
So, over the past few months I've been working with the council, the local riders and the local cycling club to put forward some plans to sort the surface out so we have a nice smooth surface to ride and to see what can be done to sort out the jumps since they need some attention to get them to a resonable condition.
Last night I had a meeting with the council and the builder and have just had confirmation that they are going to go with my suggestions to widen the track slightly to enable at least 2 riders to ride side by side (sadly not enough material or room for 4 but better than nothing). We are also looking at redesigning the last line and tweaking most of the jumps. Work should start very shortly.
Here is a rough diagram of what is there currently (roughly to scale)
and here is the provisional plans for changes (current layout in dotted lines) Main aim was the widen the middle two lines and to open up the berms as they are a little tight at the moment. Last line is just a mess and needs completely redoing but is scope for artistic licence!!
If you are wondering how big the footprint of the track is 45m by 25m with most lines being about 4m wide (some wider and hopefully by the finish will be 4m as a minimum) - so I think a reasonable size.
Would welcome any input on how we could tweak the layout since its up to me, the contractor and some others to design the changes now.
I'm so excited!!! Can't wait to ride it!!
