The supposedly incredible cost of racing (ridiculous article content)

We done this one yet?

Second hand TCR and a cheap 99 quid turbo. Job done.

What an idiot

And how is £16k of bikes justifiable at that level, although he try’s hard to bring it across as “annual spend”? He’s only fooling himself.

The entire article is nonsense, from skim reading it, he didn’t even buy those 8k bikes, they are loaned from the team.

Is this the same guy?
https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/points?person_id=29795&year=2015&d=4

A flippin wattbike too! How is that an annual cost?

Yes HH, I think it is him.

I don’t like him. I get why they’ve done that article, but it’s a bit like saying “dining out for families costs £275k a year*”

*if you’re a family of 6 going to the Fat Duck every day

Yes, racing does cost £25k a year if you spend £18.5k on bikes, then add a £2,250 Wattbike on top!

Is this the same guy?

Yep, the one who doesn’t appear to have scored a single point 😕

That’s an enormously impressive total. But it implies he’s buying a new Wattbike, TT bike, racing bike, training bike and spare wheels every year at a cost of GBP20,750.

If you depreciate that lot over even 3 years you get down around GBP10k per year. Which is still quite a lot, of course, just nowhere near the headline number.

yep assume he is either not buying 3 bikes a year or not selling them on at the end of the season.

The racing bill
1. Two fully-equipped racing bikes for time trialing and road races……….. £16,000
2. Winter training bike …………………………………………………………………….. £2,000
3. Spare racing wheels …………………………………………………………………… £500
4. Cost of race entries for 8-month season ……………………………………….. £1,000
5. Transport costs to races (diesel) ………………………………………………….. £1,500
6. Indoor trainer (I use a Wattbike) ……………………………………………………. £2,250
7. Training camp (Majorca) ………………………………………………………………. £700
8. Nutrition including supplements, gels and protein ……………………………. £800
9. Race clothing ……………………………………………………………………………… £500
10. Replacing tyres ………………………………………………………………………… £300
Total ……………………………………………………………………………………………. £25,550

I remember doing some events in the UK and I reckon I could spend 6-900 on entries easily if I had the cash about.
300 on rubber sounds possible over 2-3 bikes
A trail bike and a DH bike probably 10k if you wanted to go there same for trail and XC (again if you wanted to)
Transport and accommodation would be up there for any national series
Training camp? Is that the same as going to the alps with your mates and getting pissed?

Reckon any serious mountain biking amateur could get close 🙂

Over the next 12 months I reckon I have the potential for 3x 4-5 day races costs to do them are fairly high but they are holidays for me.

Doing a 1/2 marathon next weekend, will come up around about 150-200 quid for the weekend and thats just up the road.

I’d not argue with 4, 5, 9 and 10 but the rest are not annual costs and are hugely extravagant.

£2k on a winter training. LOOOOOOLLOLOLL

Yep, the one who doesn’t appear to have scored a single point

Excellent, I consider myself far superior by gaining the same results at approx 5% of his outlay.

There are always some people that blow huge amounts racing. It doesn’t make them fast though. I used to race 3-4 times a week and used to see this all the time.

****.

😀 head of knobs.

Has he really failed to get any points? I really can’t be arsed to give it anything other than the quickest of skims.

Bloody hell, I did a season (four weekends) racing a 125 last year and it cost less than £2500 including buying the bike and new tyres! I came second* in the NEMCRC proddy 125 championship, in case anyone’s interested.

* by dint of turning up and not crashing than by actual ability and/or speed 😆

Just another sensationalist piece by a media slowly dying and trying to drive some interest.

It’s the same with any hobby, there’s a minimum price of entry – usually a tiny fraction of what people choose to spend, but when someone really gets into it, they spend what they can.

If they want to be staggered they should look at Clubman level Motorsport, my friends used to race a bit, it was cheap to start (relative to motorsport) you bought a unloved 80’s hothatch for a few hundred quid, a cage for a few hundred more, a race suit and a helmet and with a bit of spanner work you were good to go – races were a few hundred to entre – so you could race a full season maybe £2000 including travel – the car would cost you about the same and if you didn’t crash it too much it would last for years as the rules meant you couldn’t go too mad upgrading it. Then the lovely old guy who ran it, retired and someone else took over – the rules used to say the cars had to be road legal and driven to the track – which obviously limited how mad you could go, that went out the window, and people wanted to spend a bit more to go faster, and a bit more and a bit more.

I’m not joking, but in first year they were involved the fastest car on the grid was a 1.6 vetec Honda Civic from the early 90’s – it probably cost £4000 to build, last year the top class had a Ferrari 458, a Porsche 997 and a Mosler in it – full race spec super cars, same series and in 10 years it’s gone from £2500 cars to £250,000 cars.

I’d say that this is probably a fair annual cost, although £500 on clothing seems on the low side.

Next year he’ll be spending more on sailing, last years flash-in-the-pan hobby was probably golf.

WyndyMilla

‘Nuff said 😉

I particularly like the fact that he needs £500 on clothes. Is this to fit in with roadie haute couture?

However, I’ll show this to the wife before I buy a new groupset!

edit. vinnyeh – £500 on clothes is low? I get that roadie clothing is super tight and so a bit more expensive but presuably you just need one pair of shorts, a top and the knowledge of how to use a washing machine??

Puncture during a ride and that’s another £100 for the replacement racing tubular tyre.

🙄

I particularly like the fact that he needs £500 on clothes. Is this to fit in with roadie haute couture?

to be fair, if that includes helmet, shoes, race cape, a couple of bibs and an jersey you wouldn’t be far off £500. But you wouldn’t have to replace them every year.

Has he really failed to get any points?

According to the BC link, yes. According to his article he got a podium in a team time trial.

Dunno what category he’s riding. One assumes he played the “I used to be fast” card, he’s clearly not a 4th from the events he’s done, but isn’t showing a category at all on the BC website, and has done some events that are E/1/2 and some that are 3rds only. Presumably a 3rd cat.

Strange way of coming to that overall figure – he clearly states his team provide him with race bikes, so why is that included yet the cost of his car (or van) is left out, because without that he wouldn’t be getting to the 8 months’ worth of races? Guess a Man-Spends-Moderate-Amount-On-Recreational-Pursuit story would be less interesting.

To be fair to the guy, from his results this year he’s a 3rd cat but he isn’t riding chipper races so a bit harsh to mock him for not scoring any points yet!

I don’t understand how he’s racing in Cat E/1/2 and 2/3 races when he doesn’t appear to have raced in any Cat 4 races to get points to move up?

I always thought that you needed to get a certain amount of points at Cat 4 before you could move up to Cat 3 and so on?

I always thought that you needed to get a certain amount of points at Cat 4 before you could move up to Cat 3 and so on?

Not if you phone BC and say “can I have a 3rd cat licence please”. If you’ve got previous palmares (as he does) then they’ll usually oblige. Ditto in mountain biking – people have had expert or even elite licences following a long break.

Not if you phone BC and say “can I have a 3rd cat licence please”. If you’ve got previous palmares (as he does) then they’ll usually oblige. Ditto in mountain biking – people have had expert or even elite licences following a long break.

Ah, that’ll explain it then 🙂

They were talking about that one on the GCN show last night, safe to say they were not in agreement in any way at all.

In fact, let me break it down a touch into a sensible but not overly frugal spend:
1. Two fully-equipped racing bikes for time trialing and road races £16,000. I can understand 2 bikes, one road, one TT, let give a generous £3k each to that, though I wouldn’t expect to replace those every year.
2. Winter training bike … £2,000. For a winter bike?!?! £1k, maybe £1.5k to be generous and in no way replaced every year, in fact, you could argue £0 as just use an old race bike. I’ll give £1k.
3. Spare racing wheels £500. I can see that actually, that’s not too bad.
4. Cost of race entries for 8-month season £1,000. I’ll leave that too as I have no idea how much the races he entered cost.
5. Transport costs to races (diesel) £1,500. This seems high to me, I reckon that’s something like 10,000 miles at 40mpg, I’m going to halve it. £750
6. Indoor trainer (I use a Wattbike), £2,250. Nope, that’s a bloody expensive trainer, winter bike on a good turbo, £300 being generous and no way is that replaced each year.
7. Training camp (Majorca). £700. If you must, you could just man up and ride in the rain though, you’ve got a new winter bike after all…
8. Nutrition including supplements, gels and protein, £800. High even if you live on this stuff. I’ll halve it, particularly if you’re buying in bulk, £400.
9. Race clothing, £500. Fair, on the low side arguably.
10. Replacing tyres, £300. £30 each for Veloflex Masters online means 10 new tyres a year. High but I’m feeling generous.

Total £25,550 Nope, try £11,450. And I’ve been very generous in some of those numbers I think, for a start you don’t need 3 new bikes and a new turbo trainer every year. I reckon you could get that down without too much hardship as well.

9 is actually a bit low I’d say considering a TT skinsuit could be half of that. Two jerseys, two bibs, socks, gloves, overshoes, arm and leg warmers, rain jacket, etc. He’s probably not included two or three helmets (TT and road) and shoes. Then there’s training kit.

6 though, that made me laugh out loud.

Spent less on my bike than his nutrition budget, and I wasn’t last.

Hopefully he’ll go back to golf now.

If you’re racing at a high enough level to warrant all that stuff, surely you’d get at least some of it for free or discounted?

Two jerseys, two bibs, socks, gloves, overshoes, arm and leg warmers, rain jacket, etc… Then there’s training kit.

This is why I have been doing so badly at racing, I have one pair of bib shorts, one jersey, and a smelly old fleece to keep me warm before the start.. even worse, I sometimes train in a normal t-shirt if my jersey is dirty!

And arguably, as the vast majority of cyclists don’t cycle naked, clothing isn’t a race specific expenditure.

The brutal truth is that without the support of the Surrey-based bike builder, there is little chance I could afford to compete again at elite level in the UK.

What a load of bollocks. You can quite easily be competitive on a £1K bike.

The one accurate bit of that article is the first two paras – I’ve raced a few times on a team with Norman Dunn, and he is indeed very much the quiet, tough type.

He was a 1st Cat in 1998 – most of his Telegraph articles are very much the “I used to race a bike so I know what I’m talking about” attitude, quite sneery and dismissive of “lesser riders”. I think he might have had a try-out for what was then the British Cycling Junior squad back in the mid-90’s but never quite made it.

Either way, he dropped out of racing completely, his Twitter indicates that he was in the military for a while (Marines maybe?) so he often comments with “authority and expertise” on that too.

Standard sensationalist article, the Daily Fail did something very recently about “racing into debt to ride a top end bike” saying about how people were spending “as much as a second hand sports car” on a bicycle and then putting a sort of 😯 😯 spin on it.

If he can’t win a 2/3 road race then I doubt he’s going to win the Masters Road Race Championships.

Yes, just the standard “people spend indulgent amount on hobby” shocker.

Next year he’ll be spending more on sailing, last years flash-in-the-pan hobby was probably golf.

My sailing spend over the last year. Getting back ito it so 99% of stuff had to be bought this year, and I’ve included old stuff at new prices too to make the list complete.

Boat £2500
Sails £1500 (2x, competative life of sails in the class is usualy 3 years, so really that’s 6 years of sails).
Wetsuit £150
Boots £30
Knee pads £30
PFD £35
Gloves £70 (2x pairs and liners)
Assorted base layers and rash vests £40
Balaclava £10
Spray top £30
Re-roping and new blocks to get it how I like it £300
Maintenance sundries (epoxy, sandpaper etc) £50
Race entries ~12 x £20 for the summer and winter traveler series, + £90 nationals.
Accomodation £300 (only where camping or the car wasn’t an option)
Fuel £300 (guestimate, assuming half a tank per race).
Club membership £200
Insurance £50
Food £££

<£6k, and at least 2/3rds of that is in assets that will depreciate over 3-6 years, so the yearly costs are probably arround the £1000-£1500 mark, or about £10/race

And that’s enough to my boat to the same spec as the top of the fleet, club racing 2.5 races a week, and me to all the open events, if I just wanted to do the club races I reckon it could be done for a tiny fraction of that!

I used to do a bit of Landrover/4×4 off-road stuff.. nothing too serious, just off-road navigation stuff.
I had a battered 110 Defender with decent recovery points, and reasonable driving skills.
You can have loads of fun on the 4×4 scene with a £2k second-hand Discovery/Suzuki Vitara, a set of lumpy remoulds and some recovery gear.

However, I also used to marshal/do recovery work at various ‘extreme challenge’ events.
Most entrants would turn up with a Defender pick-up fitted with mud tyres, a winch and a cage.. maybe £9k worth of investment.
Others would turn up to the same (amateur) events with a fully space-framed buggy, with a £3k winch bolted to each end…
Rumour had it that some of these guys were sinking £75k+ into these trucks.

Every ‘hobby’ is the same, some people are happy spending enough to get by at a reasonable level, while others need the best of everything.

– however as soon as it involves an engine, it starts to make cycling look cheap…

Just skimmed the article, his figures don’t add up really. Mostly I was amazed the he is only 40 – he hasn’t aged too well has he! His byline photo could be someone 10-15 years older.

I posted the article to Norm on FB – I wonder what he has to say about Andrew (nothing at all most likely)

Has he really failed to get any points?

he finished 22nd overall in the tour of the reservoir, that suggests to me he’s a very strong racer indeed.

His numbers are utter rubbish. I know an Elite road rider and his training kit was all old team stuff from in some cases up to 15 years old, and his winter bike was a 10+ year old race bike. His sponsor give him a road bike and I think they paid his entries and for 1 or 2 sets of kit. His TT frame and wheels were bought 1/2 price and built up with stuff he had already and stuff at trade. Winter training was a bike on a mid range turbo or rollers in the shed. A lot of this stuff lasts 10+ years, if looked after. Guesstimating I’d put the year at ~3-5k.

Clearly the jurno is no accountant!!