The bad news is the old one was lumpy enough, yet the new one is ever so slightly more so!
I'm looking forward to it very much - even that sizeable bump at the end - but it does give us a chance to freewheel all the way home (sorry fixie-riders!).
It's difficult to compare climbing figures without knowing exactly how they were generated. The new one is from a GPS survey I did fo the route last September. GPS tends to give a slightly higher figure than a contour count (especially in places like the Elan Valley) - I've always found about 200m or so increase over my original contour counts when getting a GPS derived figure from the AAA man. I don't know how Dave Pountney's old figure was derived.
But my impression having ridden the route is that it is slightly hillier than the Kidderminster route. The difference is primarily at the end - the return leg along the A488 to the last control is hillier than the route back down the A44 to Kingsland was. And of course there's that little bump at the end, which is somewhat more challenging than Clows Top was.
I would also say that my revisions have made the route slower. Gone is the fast blast along the A456 at the start and (less so) the end. Replaced by a rather lanier route down through the Shropshire hills (although you sneak through the Stretton fault on the way out).
