Clemens Schürmann as architect
 

In 1925 he was asked by a cycling club "Clemens, you have been a famous cyclist and now you are also an architect. Couldn't you build a cycle track for us?". And so it all started.    Clemens designed his first cycle track, a 300 m long, open-air track from wood.    His next task was an indoor cycle track in his home-town Muenster, only 160 m long. This track became his object of evolution. Since he was not satisfied with the form of the track as a rider, he tried all possible variations on this track as an architect.

 

Each year this track was built up for the winter season and each year he changed the form after his own practical experiences, when he tried it out, still riding himself until 1927. He altered the inclinations and most of all the form of the transitions, which are even more important on shorter tracks.    Against the usual mathematical formulas he changed the transitions in such a way that the riders are led out of the curve by the track itself. He found that at the location of the highest centrifugal forces the riders should not be bothered with steering, but should be "helped" by the track to stay in the chosen line.   This is the reason why the riders feel so well on Schürmann tracks and why they are able to produce their best performances on them.

 

Within the following 28 years -interrupted by World War II- he built as many as 40 tracks in Germany and the neighboring countries. With tracks of length's from 153 m to 500 m, indoors and outdoors, from wood and from concrete he gathered the knowledge and experience, which laid the foundation stone for an ongoing tradition.    His certainly most famous track was the "Vigorelli"-track in Milan, Italy (1936). Practically all world records of that time and the following years were broken on this track and it was THE location of world-record-attempts for many, many years.