The organisers of the relaunched Tour of Britain want to ensure it becomes the obvious choice for riders building up to the world road race championships at the end of September, two weeks after the race ends. The British Tour is competing for riders with the Vuelta a España, but the race organiser, Mark Bennett, feels that many of those who ride the Spanish Tour now feel it is simply too tough.
The penultimate leg of this year’s Tour of Britain through East Anglia, for example, will be 225km – a suitable length for riders building to the 250km world title – and will only prove truly demanding if the wind blows strongly off the North Sea.
“One of the successful things about last year was four of the medallists at the world championships had ridden our race,” Bennett said. “Three of the them were gold medallists – Brad Wiggins in the time trial, Michal Kwiatkowski in the road race, and BMC in the team time trial. We want to become the go-to event for riders and teams targeting the worlds.
“The Vuelta is so hotly contested, like all the Grand Tours, that riders come out knackered, too tired to win a world title. Where we are in the calendar this has to be our goal, which is why we are including longer stages.”
The 2015 event focuses heavily on the north and east of Britain, with a grand départ on Anglesey – the first time the British Tour has started on an island – followed by a tough leg in Lancashire, which Bennett describes as resembling a “mini Classic”, and a stage up the Cumbrian coast and into Scotland. Next comes a stage start in Edinburgh, which has not hosted a British national Tour since the days of the PruTour in 1999.
Two days in the heart of northern England begin with the leg out of Scotland south-east into the Northumberland coastal town of Blyth before a stage along Hadrian’s Wall to the race’s highest summit finish to date, at close to 2,000 feet above sea level on Hartside Fell. At 8.8km long to a finish height of 1,905 feet, this is tougher than either Haytor or the Tumble, summit finishes in 2013 and 2014.
The race is likely to be decided on that fifth stage, or perhaps on the next day’s run through the Peak District between Stoke and Nottingham, which the organisers describe as “very lumpy”. The final weekend is mainly flat fare; the race returns to East Anglia for the first time since 2012 for a marathon stage between Fakenham and Ipswich on the Saturday, followed by a modified central London circuit race, on a course that now includes Regent Street, with the finish near Piccadilly Circus tube station.
The London circuit change was forced on the organisers due to works to build the capital’s cycle superhighway, but the result is a more technical circuit to be covered 15 times, with a strength-sapping drag all the way from Downing Street to the finish. “It will be more intense than up and down the Embankment, and any team that has the leader’s jersey will need to be on its mettle,” said Bennett.
Like the Tour de France, the British Tour now focuses on certain individual areas of the country in a given year, rather than trying to go everywhere all at once. “We can’t do all of the UK in eight days, it’s physically impossible,” said Bennett. “That means we regionalise it and move between those regions to cut down on transfers between the stages. The other thing we want is to be reaching even more spectators – I’d like that circuit in London to be wall to wall with people. And take that stage in Lancashire – fans can watch that four times easily including the start and finish.”
Bennett added that following the race’s move to hors-catégorie status – in the second rank of events on the professional calendar – there are no moves afoot to take the race into the WorldTour, the elite of the sport. “We would have to move to eight-man teams, and the roads we have wouldn’t accommodate a field that big.” Such a move would also mean changing the current team mix, which Bennett feels keeps the race “fresh and exciting”.
