Last weekend was a really fun one! I got the chance to go down at the Final weekend of the Downhill South East Series. The finals were happening at Snowshoe Mountain Resort in West Virginia. It is a very remote location for the East coast but somewhere that all the mountain biking and especially downhill fans will know about. It will host its first ever Downhill Mountain Biking World Cup this coming September.
The night before the event, I had the chance to watch Neko and a few of his friends sending hard on a big jump that they built for the World Cup track. It was at sunset and you will see from the images, it was breath taking!
More pictures of the sunset session can be found here
Founder of the Downhill South East series and USA DH World cup member, Neko Mulally, invited Zone4 to come down and show them how easy it is with our system to set up timing splits down the mountain on the DH course. This is huge for DH events because riders loves to know where they gained or lost times on the way down. With the current system that the downhill events are using in most of the venues, it is currently really complicated and almost impossible to offer split times. There was a lot of excitement within the riders and the organization to have Zone4 on site!
The day before the events, we walked the race track and decided on the location of the 2 splits. Each of them were easy and fast to set up. The setting up is simple, it is just a wire loop that is put either under the dirt or covered up with mats like you will see on the next picture bellow. Then, our activators (the split timing device) runs wireless and on batteries. They are about the size of your hand so they are easy to bring in a backpack.
On top of being able to set up 2 splits down the hill, we were able to have a TV at the bottom of the course to show live splits as the racers were coming down. This created a huge excitement for the crowd and the racers who could watch live, just like World Cup style, the ranking of the racer coming down the hill.
Overall, it was a really fun and an exciting race! Since it was a demo, we timed 50 competitors and offered live timing for them. Results can be found here. Expect to see the Downhill South East events using Zone4 in their next year’s events!
See a really cool article about the event here !
More info on the Zone4 chip timing system can be found on our website at www.zone4.ca
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