NUMBERS may have been down but the speed of Brad Rayner and Mark Windsor certainly wasn't on Sunday.
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The duo stormed home to win the Bathurst Cycling Club's third teams time trial event in a time of 32 minutes and 44 seconds.
The winning time was well down on Rayner and Windsor's best mark but was understandable in the swirling winds around Perthville and Georges Plains across the weekend.
Rayner and Windsor, along with Charlie Gascoyne, set a scorching time of 30:29 over the 22.4 kilometre course during the first round of the team time trial in early June.
Windsor said it was disappointing to fall well short of the record time but was happy with the day's efforts in the tough conditions.
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"It's more or less just going against your times but the conditions were really tough out there," he said.
"Brad was going quite strongly. I didn't contribute too much on Sunday. We were more than two minutes off that record, which is around 30 and a half minutes.
"Conditions were so rough with the wind that we were never going to get near it. Brad was going good and did a lot of extra turns."
With numbers down across all grades the focus went onto times as opposed to standings.
In B grade Dave Reece, Brian Draper and Graham Stait completed the course in 36:05.
The C grade quartet of David McKellar, Breadon Smith, Nev Krahe and Peter Wilson combined well to finish in 39:43.
Jette McKellar and Dave Hyland, in D grade, finished in 46:34 while the fastest female combination of the day was Rosemary Hastings and Marian Renshaw (50:14).
The time trial series serves a chance for Bathurst riders to prepare for masters teams events on the horizon.
"We've got state championships coming up for a team time trials, so we're trying to work out whether it's worthwhile getting teams together for that," Windsor said.
"At the moment it's going to be hard to do it but we still do the training to see where our teams are at because we've won in the past over there."