A Bike Race on a Car Track: Lime Rock GP
Last weekend the TBD team headed up to the wooded hills of northern Connecticut for the 2026 edition of the Limerock GP.
Taking place just south of Sailsbury, CT, the limerock GP is a yearly road race which takes place on the 2.3km Lime Rock Raceway circuit. The lap takes place in an anticlockwise direction and starts with a short sharp hill at the end of the start/finish straight consisting of 250m at 8.5% climbing around 15 meters of elevation. From there you enter a sweeping turn on top of the hill before descending back down to the bottom level of the course, this leads you into some sweeping S bends at high speed from the descent before a final 180 degree turn back into the finish line.
This year the TBD line up consisted of 6 team members with the best result of the day coming from Annie Purcell who won the Women’s Cat 4/5 field! Below are the race reports from Annie and Simon who raced in the Cat 3/4 field.
Annie Purcell
The Lime Rock Grand Prix was a race I remember eyeing last year mostly for the allure of racing on an actual race track. As the weekend approached, the talk was mostly of the one punchy hill on the course, which I didn’t expect for a race track. As someone who does so much park racing and hadn’t done this race before, showing up to a race not knowing the course introduced an element of excitement (read: nervousness). Preparation involved watching videos of prior year races and checking Strava segments. We even did a drive by of the course on our way home from dinner the night before, where an employee kindly let us peak around a couple minutes before closing, craning our necks to get a look at the hill.
We had come up the day before and the weather let us down, but thankfully we couldn’t have asked for a better day on race day - maybe with the exception of a little too much wind. We warmed up on some go cart tracks and got a feel for the hill riding up an adjacent path. The two women’s fields (1/2/3 and 4/5) lined up at the same time with the 1/2/3 going off first behind a lead car fit for a race track and a strong NYC contingent in both fields.
Things were pretty tame to start as everyone seemed to be feeling out the course and the field. The women’s 4/5 race was scheduled to be 50 minutes which wound up being 10 laps. The hill was hard but survivable. I focused on protecting myself from the wind and being ready for an attack. After a couple laps there were some tests of the field by way of surges in speed but nothing too threatening. Particularly with the wind on the day, it’s a tough course to get away on. Perhaps in the field we all just had a fairly “rational” mindset and no one was willing to expend the energy for a break that wasn’t likely to stick - generally validated by the fact that most other fields did claw back any breaks.
On the back half of the course on the final lap, Kruis pushed the pace. I was positioned well and right there to cover. I was having a blast zipping down the hill into the final curves at a fast pace but also suffering a bit. I didn’t get a chance to look behind, but I had the sense that this had strung things however everyone was still more or less together. What it meant though, was that just as the attack fizzled it was about time to get ready to sprint.
Just after we came around the last bend an acceleration caught the corner of my right eye and I was out of the saddle as quickly as my body could react. The rider had gotten a good jump but it was an early launch and there was still a bit of road in front of us. I’m still new to really going for a sprint and the couple of times that I’ve been successful I magically found myself in the right gear. but here - after the first half of the sprint I could feel that I wasn’t going to make it if I didn’t shift down.
I shifted down one gear and pushed myself to sprint through the line (no bike throwing skills for me). I just barely got my front wheel over the line first. I had really gritted through the last bit and I was aware that my facial expression made that no secret (see photo to the side). I was proud of my awareness and ability to adjust mid-sprint. And just winning on the line is a good reminder to not give up.
Despite a bit of a tame race - the course was super fun (maybe I’d flatten out the hill if I could) and it was also an awesome day with teammates. I had an equally fun time running around the course supporting teammates in the men’s race!4
Simon Brown
This was a fast race with brutal windthe whole time!
I was feeling really good going into the event and was relieved when I found my legs to be in good shape as we got things going, right from the gun people were attacking the climb on pretty much every lap, stringing out the field and keeping the intensity high meaning there was little time to recover.
About half way through I punched it up the hill created a gap with a couple of guys from Vaselka. We gave it everything but in the end the high wind resulted in the three of us not having enough man power to stay ahead and we were caught by the peloton two laps later.
From there on things stayed pretty much the same for the latter part of the race, hard climbs and punchy attacks keeping things spicy.
With 5 laps to go Matt launched a flier and hauled himself up the road, this proved to be a fantastic rest opportunity for me as I rolled up to the front and proceeded to put in as little effort as possible, holding up the bunch to see if he could hang on until the end. Unfortunately it was not meant to be and despite the stirling effort the peloton had other ideas and finally reeled him back in with 2 laps to go.
I had been feeling good on the climb all race so decided to punch it on the final climb, five of us made a gap but I unfortunately was not quite on the wheel and ended up ~5m off the wheel having to do all of the watts around the back of the track to try and stay on. Fate had its way and I was swallowed up by the pack coming around the last corner, my legs were cooked from the attack meaning I wasn’t involved in the sprint and rolled through somewhere near the back of the pack. Not a good result but happy with the way I raced, seeing the power of some of the guys in the sprint I think the best chance of me being in contention was to try and be in a smaller group from further out so don't regret the decisionI made!
