road racing – is there really a need for so many heavily laden large cars to drive along at inefficient speeds following people riding bikes? I don't get it. as bad for the Maldives as pure motor racing. am i missing something?

Yeah, it's almost as bad as all those heavily laden cars with draggy bikes on the roof being driven to trail centres every weekend.

My guess is that roadies also drive to their events – no one at a trail centre is then followed by a convoy of 4×4's. MTB trail centre use like any other activity which people drive to. Road race, totally different situation.

MTB races that go from point a to point b tend to have motor bikes following then and often some 4×4 as well. MTB races like xc which are on short course that go round and round is more like track cycling in that respect.

So, the big tours will have a convoy of 2 cars per team, plus neutral support. TV, motorbikes etc too. So, maybe 100 cars, driving for 7 hours. 700 car hours. Equivalent to 700 people driving for an hour.

Care to estimate the number of car hours driven in the UK each day?

Let's take professional football (or rugby, so we don't play to the football haters). How do the 15,000 people (Premiership rugby) get to the ground? Most sports cause pollution when you consider the bigger picture but I think that there are others that cause more than pro road racing.

In terms of a hobby /enthusiast sport, road cycling is way more eco-friendly than MTBing.
A roadie will ride from the front door to the club meeting point, everyone will ride for a few hours then split off and head home.
A MTBer will load the car up, drive anywhere from 10-200 miles each way, do a ride then drive home.

In terms of it being a proper competitive sport then it works out differently – virtually everyone (roadie or MTBer) will load their bike into a car, drive to the start point and do their race. In most domestic road races there's 3-4 cars and maybe 1-3 motorbikes and they're essential for the safety of the bunch and other road users. Cars carry the race commissaires, First Aid and (in bigger races) neutral support. IN MTBing you obviously can't have cars but there's often a couple of quad bikes/motorbikes out there.

In *any* sporting event, there's the associated pollution of all the spectators/sponsors/traders etc driving there as well. Anyway, it could be worse, it could be Formula 1.

idave in general road riders don't spend the weekend driving all over the country to ride for a couple of hours. You can just ride straight from the door. Most folk on here seem to think it's perfectly reasonable to drive hundreds of miles to go for a ride.

Of course support cars are polluting, as is travlling to events, but I don't really see your point.

i dislike the principle of a lot of cars following people riding bikes. it seems wrong and unnecessary

Each to their own, I dislike people driving hundreds of miles to ride bikes every weekend, I dislike people driving to work when there are better options, I dislike people driving heavily polluting cars. There are far worse non eco friendly things than cars following a bike race.

It's pretty much irrelevant anyway because up there in the sky, burning something like 15 gallons per hour solely for your viewing pleasure…

Road transport accounts for some 11% of carbon emissions. It's better to turn down the central heating, not buy any products shipped from overseas, forgo a plasma TV, opt out of digital radio and invest in solar panels if you want to make a difference. And that's before we start to talk about air travel (A Boeing 747 uses as much fuel in a transatlantic trip as a 2 litre family car will in 120 years).

As for politicians who travel tens of thousands of miles by air every year to preach about CO2 emissions, it speaks volumes for how seriously they take their own message.

There are far worse offenders out there than people who drive to trail centres or road race support cars.

Always wondered what it's like for the riders in the TdeF.

Imagine slogging up,say,the alpe d'huez,desparately taking in lungfulls of,hopefully,fresh mountain air,& 10 feet in front of you is a motorbike or three with a commisaire/photographer/tv cameraman on the back.

Imagine all the fumes that they must be drawing in!

Personally dont give a hoot about eco nonsense. In my opinion the spectacle could be improved by lining the route with burning car tyres.

Watch this from the TDF 2006 on the Champs Elysee..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoJcvS7yWh8

double post

Surely one of the best, most enviromentally sound things about top level roadracing is that instead of the spectators all jumping in their cars, the event comes to THEM, with most of the folk lining the routes being local( well aside from Alpe d'Huez which is booked by Dutch loonies!)
What other sport goes past peoples front doors, for free.
C'mon, iDave you just started this thread to have a pop at roadies didn't you!( wait till you hear that they have a union, and sometimes go on strike) 🙂

nothing against roadies, or cars, at all – I am one, and drive a car

0091paddy's video gets my point across better than I can