2026 North Yorkshire Grand Prix: reports and results
Morven Yeoman and Tom Armstrong took the Rapha Super-League and National Road Series titles at Ampleforth, where Anna Morris and Sebastian Grindley won the races.
Anna Morris (Private Member) sprinted her way to glory at the first North Yorkshire Grand Prix at Ampleforth Abbey, formerly known as the Ryedale Grand Prix, as she prevailed over Melanie Rowe (Private Member) and Lily Martin (Loughborough Lightning). In the afternoon Sebastian Grindley (Lidl-Trek Future Racing) settled the open race in much the same fashion, going clear in the abbey grounds to beat Jack Rootkin-Gray and Damien Clayton.
The bigger prizes went to Morven Yeoman. With both the Rapha Super-League and the National Road Series reaching their final round on the abbey roads, sixth place on the day was all the DAS-Hutchinson rider needed to be crowned champion of each. She takes the Super-League by 58 points and the National Road Series by 12 from Martin, adding the under-23 classification, while her team seal the road series team title.
Tom Armstrong completed the same double in the open competitions, though by a far finer margin. The Wheelbase CabTech Castelli rider began the day 13 points behind Ollie Wood in the Super-League and finished fourth; Wood was distanced before halfway and came home 57th, outside the points. Armstrong takes that title by five, adds the National Road Series he had all but sealed, and sees his team claim the open team title.
Featured image: Olly Hassell/SWPix.com
Reports
Women
What better way of breaking the fifth heatwave of the summer than by hosting a bike race? After a week of sunny skies and hot temperatures, Ampleforth welcomed the women’s peloton with pretty much unrelenting rain throughout the morning, providing cool conditions and slippery roads around North Yorkshire.
Perhaps it was the conditions, or maybe more the nerves of riders with titles still on the line, but the opening lap proved to be a rather cagey affair. Driven forward by Handsling Alba Development Team, and with Martin and Yeoman marking each other at the front, the peloton was stringing out without ever fully snapping.
Despite Martin putting in repeated digs on the climbs that pepper the course, as soon as the road flattened out, the 57-rider peloton would reform into a bigger mass.
Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
However, it always seemed the Lightning rider’s repeated moves were going to stick at some point. Coming out of the Abbey grounds to start the second long circuit lap her perseverance finally paid off. She attacked clear with Morris and quickly opened a dozen seconds on a 10-rider chasing group.
Joined in short order by Rowe to form a front three, the trio were working well together and quickly built up a 1m28sec lead halfway round the second circuit.
Despite the chasing group including Yeoman and her DAS-Hutchinson teammate Ellie Parry, Smurfit Westrock Cycling Team pairing Elena Day and Leila Gschwentner, Ruby Oakes (FTP-Fulfil The Potential Racing), Arianne Holland (Handsling Alba Development Road Team), Amy Henchoz (Paralloy RT), and Jennifer Powell (Performance Development Team), no one wanted to be the one to put themselves at the front and expend the energy reeling in the three leaders.
Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
It didn’t help the chasers’ cause that Morris, Martin, and Rowe were working well together, described as a team time trial effort on race radio, and as they crossed the line for the second time their lead had grown to more than three minutes as the chase group was caught by a group behind to reform the peloton.
Come the start of the penultimate lap and the advantage ballooned to over five minutes as the peloton looked to see who could claim whatever spoils were left over, and whether Yeoman, who by this point had all three teammates in the group with her, could get herself far enough forward to bank enough points to retain the Series title.
Come the final approach to Ampleforth, the three leaders almost assumed track mode with no one wanting to be the first one to burn their matches by launching an early attack which would be shot down by the other two.
Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
As they got closer to the line it was Morris who finally made the decisive move, launching inside the final 150m to take victory, with Rowe using every ounce of her power to pip Martin to the runner-up spot. A fortnight after taking team pursuit bronze for Wales at the Commonwealth Games, and 12 months after losing the inaugural Rapha Super-League by five points, the unattached rider had the biggest domestic win of her season.
Behind her, Rowe’s second place was arguably the ride of the day. The 17-year-old, third at the junior Liège-Bastogne-Liège earlier this year, spent more than three laps in a two-up and then three-up move against riders several years her senior, and finishes fifth in the final National Road Series standings.
Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
Sixth place was more than enough for Yeoman, who admitted afterwards to “not having the best legs”. The Rapha Super-League had in truth been decided before the flag dropped: with 25 points on offer at the last of eight rounds, her lead was already beyond reach. She finishes on 140 points, 58 clear of DAS-Hutchinson teammate Katie Scott, with Morris’s win lifting her six places to third on 81. Daisy Taylor (The Hera Project) is fourth and Madeline Cooper (Handsling Alba Development Road Team) fifth.
The National Road Series was the tighter of the two, and it went the same way. Yeoman ends on 298 to Martin’s 286, with Oakes third, Henchoz fourth and Rowe fifth. Yeoman also takes the under-23 classification, and DAS-Hutchinson the team title by 21 points from Handsling Alba Development Road Team.
The morning’s rain had cleared by the time the open race rolled out. The clouds lifted, the roads dried, and 93 riders set off on three long laps and five short ones of the undulating Yorkshire course in far more pleasant conditions.
From the off it was clear that parts of the peloton had no intention of letting the race come to them. A few early attacks were snuffed out before nine riders went clear: JAKROO Handsling Racing’s Rowan Baker and Sam Chaplin, Danylo Riwnyj (Foran CT), Eugene Cross (Schils-Doltcini Racing Team), Sebastian Grindley (Lidl-Trek Future Racing), Jack Rootkin-Gray (Private Member), Damien Clayton (Private Member), and the Wheelbase CabTech Castelli pair of Tom Martin and series leader Tom Armstrong.
Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
Seven more joined to make a lead group of 16 with serious firepower, and the advantage grew quickly. The pace was such that two of their own number, James Sawyers (Cycling Sheffield) and George Peden (Team PB Performance), were struggling to hold the wheels on the climbs.
While the front group stayed relatively intact, Armstrong launching an optimistic move that was pulled back with ease, the chase behind was fluid to say the least. Two groups merged, and with Oliver Hucks (Foran CT), Oscar Nisbett (JAKROO Handsling Racing), Rapha Super-League leader Ollie Wood (Rapha Cycling Club) and Gabriel Dellar (Ride Revolution Coaching) among them, a formidable chase group of 19 formed to try to close the gap.
Come the end of the second lap, though, action was afoot through the grounds of Ampleforth. The leaders held a minute, but the last four survivors of that chase — Peter Cocker and Jordan Giles (DAS Richardsons), Wood and Dexter Leeming-Sykes — were absorbed back into a peloton that was finally getting itself into gear.
Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
Even then the advantage oscillated wildly. Early on the third lap, before the extension that makes up the longer loop, it had been sliced to 45sec; a handful of kilometres later it was back out to 1m05sec.
That owed much to how fluid the attacking had become. By the end of the third lap a group of 10 had broken clear, but with Leeming-Sykes and Aaron King among them acting as spoilers for Martin and Armstrong ahead, that move had the peloton breathing down its neck as the smaller circuits began.
Nor was everything rosy at the front. On the first small circuit, repeated increases in pace splintered the lead group, and Joe Shillabeer (Private Member) and Peden lost contact and slipped back into the chasers behind.
The moves kept coming. One with four laps to go looked seriously threatening for a time as the race split into three, but it succeeded only in reforming the group with considerably less energy in it, given the effort required to get back on terms with the riders who had powered the break: Riwnyj, Benjamin Hinchliffe (Jamison Racing Team USA), Grindley and Mark Lightfoot (AVC Aix en Provence).
Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
They came so often it became hard to keep track. Chaplin attacked through the Abbey grounds and led by 15sec across the line, but it proved a move too far: up Yearsley Moor Bank he, teammate Baker and George Radcliffe (Atom 6 – Cycleur de Luxe – Auto Stroo Continental Team) began to lose contact.
Martin and Clayton used that as a base to launch a counter punch but were quickly scooped back up into a lead group that had regained Radcliffe and Chaplin, such was the variance in speed within the race.
As the laps counted down, those early attacks looked to have finally achieved their target. Halfway round the penultimate lap the lead group thinned to seven for a time: Riwnyj, Armstrong, Lightfoot, Hinchliffe, Grindley, Rootkin-Gray and Clayton. Then Martin, Radcliffe and Chaplin dug into their reserves once more and joined back on.
The only certainty as the bell rang in their ears was that, with more than three minutes in hand over the next chasing group, the winner was going to come from this one.
On the final tour it was all go. With energy levels flagging, attacks went constantly, Clayton and Lightfoot going clear for a time as they forced the pace at the front. But as the race distance wound down towards the Abbey the group bunched back together, six entering the grounds as one.
Sebastian Grindley takes the win wearing a black armband for Finlay Tarling. Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
No one wanted to be the first to launch the sprint, but as they got closer to the finish it was Grindley who had the power left in his legs to go, crossing the line with a comfortable advantage and pointing to the sky in tribute to his close friend Finlay Tarling. Rootkin-Gray took second, Clayton third after a spirited race from all the leaders.
Fourth place, five seconds down, was where the afternoon’s biggest prize was settled. Armstrong had started the day 13 points behind Wood in the Rapha Super-League and needed the Rapha Cycling Club rider to have a poor one. He got it: Wood was distanced before halfway and came home 57th, more than 14 minutes down and outside the points, when 16th or better would have been enough to keep the title. Armstrong’s 18 points for fourth carry him to 153 and the championship by five, having led the competition at no point all season and without winning a single round of it.
Callum Laborde (Ornata Factory Racing) holds third overall on 94 despite not starting, ahead of Armstrong’s teammate Aaron King on 93, while Rootkin-Gray’s second place lifts him nine places to sixth.
Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
The National Road Series was the more straightforward of the two. Armstrong ends on 284 to Tom Martin’s 231, with Radcliffe third and Riwnyj fourth, and Wheelbase CabTech Castelli take the team title on 719 from JAKROO Handsling Racing. The under-23 classification goes to Lewis Tinsley (BCC Race Team) on 164, from Alex Murphy (Stolen Goat 4Endurance) and Caleb Pain (Ride Revolution Coaching).
Anna Morris (Private Member) sprinted her way to glory at the first North Yorkshire Grand Prix at Ampleforth Abbey, formerly known as the Ryedale Grand Prix, as she prevailed over Melanie Rowe (Private Member) and Lily Martin (Loughborough Lightning). In the afternoon Sebastian Grindley (Lidl-Trek Future Racing) settled the open race in much the same fashion, going clear in the abbey grounds to beat Jack Rootkin-Gray and Damien Clayton.
The bigger prizes went to Morven Yeoman. With both the Rapha Super-League and the National Road Series reaching their final round on the abbey roads, sixth place on the day was all the DAS-Hutchinson rider needed to be crowned champion of each. She takes the Super-League by 58 points and the National Road Series by 12 from Martin, adding the under-23 classification, while her team seal the road series team title.
Tom Armstrong completed the same double in the open competitions, though by a far finer margin. The Wheelbase CabTech Castelli rider began the day 13 points behind Ollie Wood in the Super-League and finished fourth; Wood was distanced before halfway and came home 57th, outside the points. Armstrong takes that title by five, adds the National Road Series he had all but sealed, and sees his team claim the open team title.
Featured image: Olly Hassell/SWPix.com
Reports
Women
What better way of breaking the fifth heatwave of the summer than by hosting a bike race? After a week of sunny skies and hot temperatures, Ampleforth welcomed the women’s peloton with pretty much unrelenting rain throughout the morning, providing cool conditions and slippery roads around North Yorkshire.
Perhaps it was the conditions, or maybe more the nerves of riders with titles still on the line, but the opening lap proved to be a rather cagey affair. Driven forward by Handsling Alba Development Team, and with Martin and Yeoman marking each other at the front, the peloton was stringing out without ever fully snapping.
Despite Martin putting in repeated digs on the climbs that pepper the course, as soon as the road flattened out, the 57-rider peloton would reform into a bigger mass.
However, it always seemed the Lightning rider’s repeated moves were going to stick at some point. Coming out of the Abbey grounds to start the second long circuit lap her perseverance finally paid off. She attacked clear with Morris and quickly opened a dozen seconds on a 10-rider chasing group.
Joined in short order by Rowe to form a front three, the trio were working well together and quickly built up a 1m28sec lead halfway round the second circuit.
Despite the chasing group including Yeoman and her DAS-Hutchinson teammate Ellie Parry, Smurfit Westrock Cycling Team pairing Elena Day and Leila Gschwentner, Ruby Oakes (FTP-Fulfil The Potential Racing), Arianne Holland (Handsling Alba Development Road Team), Amy Henchoz (Paralloy RT), and Jennifer Powell (Performance Development Team), no one wanted to be the one to put themselves at the front and expend the energy reeling in the three leaders.
It didn’t help the chasers’ cause that Morris, Martin, and Rowe were working well together, described as a team time trial effort on race radio, and as they crossed the line for the second time their lead had grown to more than three minutes as the chase group was caught by a group behind to reform the peloton.
Come the start of the penultimate lap and the advantage ballooned to over five minutes as the peloton looked to see who could claim whatever spoils were left over, and whether Yeoman, who by this point had all three teammates in the group with her, could get herself far enough forward to bank enough points to retain the Series title.
Come the final approach to Ampleforth, the three leaders almost assumed track mode with no one wanting to be the first one to burn their matches by launching an early attack which would be shot down by the other two.
As they got closer to the line it was Morris who finally made the decisive move, launching inside the final 150m to take victory, with Rowe using every ounce of her power to pip Martin to the runner-up spot. A fortnight after taking team pursuit bronze for Wales at the Commonwealth Games, and 12 months after losing the inaugural Rapha Super-League by five points, the unattached rider had the biggest domestic win of her season.
Behind her, Rowe’s second place was arguably the ride of the day. The 17-year-old, third at the junior Liège-Bastogne-Liège earlier this year, spent more than three laps in a two-up and then three-up move against riders several years her senior, and finishes fifth in the final National Road Series standings.
Sixth place was more than enough for Yeoman, who admitted afterwards to “not having the best legs”. The Rapha Super-League had in truth been decided before the flag dropped: with 25 points on offer at the last of eight rounds, her lead was already beyond reach. She finishes on 140 points, 58 clear of DAS-Hutchinson teammate Katie Scott, with Morris’s win lifting her six places to third on 81. Daisy Taylor (The Hera Project) is fourth and Madeline Cooper (Handsling Alba Development Road Team) fifth.
The National Road Series was the tighter of the two, and it went the same way. Yeoman ends on 298 to Martin’s 286, with Oakes third, Henchoz fourth and Rowe fifth. Yeoman also takes the under-23 classification, and DAS-Hutchinson the team title by 21 points from Handsling Alba Development Road Team.
Open
The morning’s rain had cleared by the time the open race rolled out. The clouds lifted, the roads dried, and 93 riders set off on three long laps and five short ones of the undulating Yorkshire course in far more pleasant conditions.
From the off it was clear that parts of the peloton had no intention of letting the race come to them. A few early attacks were snuffed out before nine riders went clear: JAKROO Handsling Racing’s Rowan Baker and Sam Chaplin, Danylo Riwnyj (Foran CT), Eugene Cross (Schils-Doltcini Racing Team), Sebastian Grindley (Lidl-Trek Future Racing), Jack Rootkin-Gray (Private Member), Damien Clayton (Private Member), and the Wheelbase CabTech Castelli pair of Tom Martin and series leader Tom Armstrong.
Seven more joined to make a lead group of 16 with serious firepower, and the advantage grew quickly. The pace was such that two of their own number, James Sawyers (Cycling Sheffield) and George Peden (Team PB Performance), were struggling to hold the wheels on the climbs.
While the front group stayed relatively intact, Armstrong launching an optimistic move that was pulled back with ease, the chase behind was fluid to say the least. Two groups merged, and with Oliver Hucks (Foran CT), Oscar Nisbett (JAKROO Handsling Racing), Rapha Super-League leader Ollie Wood (Rapha Cycling Club) and Gabriel Dellar (Ride Revolution Coaching) among them, a formidable chase group of 19 formed to try to close the gap.
Come the end of the second lap, though, action was afoot through the grounds of Ampleforth. The leaders held a minute, but the last four survivors of that chase — Peter Cocker and Jordan Giles (DAS Richardsons), Wood and Dexter Leeming-Sykes — were absorbed back into a peloton that was finally getting itself into gear.
Even then the advantage oscillated wildly. Early on the third lap, before the extension that makes up the longer loop, it had been sliced to 45sec; a handful of kilometres later it was back out to 1m05sec.
That owed much to how fluid the attacking had become. By the end of the third lap a group of 10 had broken clear, but with Leeming-Sykes and Aaron King among them acting as spoilers for Martin and Armstrong ahead, that move had the peloton breathing down its neck as the smaller circuits began.
Nor was everything rosy at the front. On the first small circuit, repeated increases in pace splintered the lead group, and Joe Shillabeer (Private Member) and Peden lost contact and slipped back into the chasers behind.
The moves kept coming. One with four laps to go looked seriously threatening for a time as the race split into three, but it succeeded only in reforming the group with considerably less energy in it, given the effort required to get back on terms with the riders who had powered the break: Riwnyj, Benjamin Hinchliffe (Jamison Racing Team USA), Grindley and Mark Lightfoot (AVC Aix en Provence).
They came so often it became hard to keep track. Chaplin attacked through the Abbey grounds and led by 15sec across the line, but it proved a move too far: up Yearsley Moor Bank he, teammate Baker and George Radcliffe (Atom 6 – Cycleur de Luxe – Auto Stroo Continental Team) began to lose contact.
Martin and Clayton used that as a base to launch a counter punch but were quickly scooped back up into a lead group that had regained Radcliffe and Chaplin, such was the variance in speed within the race.
As the laps counted down, those early attacks looked to have finally achieved their target. Halfway round the penultimate lap the lead group thinned to seven for a time: Riwnyj, Armstrong, Lightfoot, Hinchliffe, Grindley, Rootkin-Gray and Clayton. Then Martin, Radcliffe and Chaplin dug into their reserves once more and joined back on.
The only certainty as the bell rang in their ears was that, with more than three minutes in hand over the next chasing group, the winner was going to come from this one.
On the final tour it was all go. With energy levels flagging, attacks went constantly, Clayton and Lightfoot going clear for a time as they forced the pace at the front. But as the race distance wound down towards the Abbey the group bunched back together, six entering the grounds as one.
No one wanted to be the first to launch the sprint, but as they got closer to the finish it was Grindley who had the power left in his legs to go, crossing the line with a comfortable advantage and pointing to the sky in tribute to his close friend Finlay Tarling. Rootkin-Gray took second, Clayton third after a spirited race from all the leaders.
Fourth place, five seconds down, was where the afternoon’s biggest prize was settled. Armstrong had started the day 13 points behind Wood in the Rapha Super-League and needed the Rapha Cycling Club rider to have a poor one. He got it: Wood was distanced before halfway and came home 57th, more than 14 minutes down and outside the points, when 16th or better would have been enough to keep the title. Armstrong’s 18 points for fourth carry him to 153 and the championship by five, having led the competition at no point all season and without winning a single round of it.
Callum Laborde (Ornata Factory Racing) holds third overall on 94 despite not starting, ahead of Armstrong’s teammate Aaron King on 93, while Rootkin-Gray’s second place lifts him nine places to sixth.
The National Road Series was the more straightforward of the two. Armstrong ends on 284 to Tom Martin’s 231, with Radcliffe third and Riwnyj fourth, and Wheelbase CabTech Castelli take the team title on 719 from JAKROO Handsling Racing. The under-23 classification goes to Lewis Tinsley (BCC Race Team) on 164, from Alex Murphy (Stolen Goat 4Endurance) and Caleb Pain (Ride Revolution Coaching).
Results
Women
Open
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