Mallorca 312 pacing: the cut-offs, the gearing and the daylight

The Mallorca 312 gives you from 06:30 to 20:40 to ride 313.2 km with 4,325 m of climbing. Almost everything written about pacing it starts from that number and stops there. The number that decides your day is a different one: what you must hold while moving, once the minutes you spend at feed stations, at traffic lights and beside the road are taken out of the allowance.

The window

14 h 10 min

06:30 start, 20:40 cut-off — the organiser's published times

Moving average needed

23.8 km/h

On the 312, if you spend one hour of the day stopped

Daylight on race day

13 h 40 min

Half an hour shorter than the time limit itself

The clock, before anything else

Two hours off the bike over a 313 km day is not gluttony — it is four feed stops of fifteen minutes, a mechanical, and the queue for the toilets. It moves the 312 from 22.1 km/h to 25.7 km/h moving, and 25.7 km/h moving over 4,325 m of climbing is a different event from the one most riders enter believing they have entered.

There is also a start-line tax. The organiser expects the last participant through the arch at 07:00, half an hour after the gun. Every minute of that is taken off the front of your allowance: starting at 07:00 leaves 13 h 40 min for the 312, which is 22.9 km/h before you stop at all.

The 226 is not the easy option

How we got this Compared required rolling speeds at equal stopped time. The 226 crosses the 312 at roughly 20 minutes of stopped time and is harder beyond it. Climbing before the km-160 split: 3,093 m on the 312, 3,097 m on the 226.Computed from the requirements table above and the per-route climbing splits measured from the GPX.Computed 5 August 2026.

Read the two allowances against each other. The 312 gets 14 h 10 min; the 226 gets 10 h 30 min. The 226 removes 83 km of flat interior road — the fastest, cheapest kilometres on the course — and removes almost none of the mountain: 3,097 m of climbing before the split, against the 312’s 3,093 m. It is the same Tramuntana, in three and a half fewer hours, and the flat you would have used to bank time has been taken away. Choose it because you want a shorter day, not because you want an easier cut-off.

Where the controls actually are

The organiser publishes intermediate cut-off times only inside its annual course-guide image, so we cannot state them. What we can state is where the controls sit on the road, because the official GPX carries a “Temps de tall” waypoint at each one, and we measured them.

Will the cut-offs catch you?

Set the speed you actually hold when you are moving, and the time you actually spend standing still. The controls below are at the kilometres this site read out of the organiser's own GPX.

Distance 312 226 167

Rolling speed

24.0

km/h

Total time stopped

60

min

Inside the limit Mallorca 312: finishing at 20:33 against a 20:40 cut-off — 7 minutes in hand.

Control	km	You arrive
Puig Major, above Gorg Blau	50.7	08:46
Es Capdellà	137.8	12:41
Sa Granja — the end of the mountains	166.9	13:59
Lloseta	193.9	15:12

Controls are shown for the 312 only — their kilometres were measured on the 312 track, and the other two routes reach the same places at different distances. For the 226 and 167 the calculator answers the finish, which is the cut-off the organiser publishes.

How we got this Arrival = start + distance ÷ rolling speed + stopped time apportioned by distance covered. A constant-speed model: it cannot know that you will climb Puig Major slowly and descend it quickly, and it assumes you stop evenly across the day. The organiser's intermediate cut-off times are published only inside an image and are not machine-readable, so this compares against the published finish limit and shows the intermediate controls as information.Computed from the cut-off waypoint kilometres from the official GPX, and the organiser's published start and finish times.Computed 5 August 2026.

The shape of a day that finishes exactly on the limit

The useful thing in that table is the middle of it. A rider on the limit clears the Puig Major control at 08:48 — two and a quarter hours in, while the day still feels easy — and is out of the mountains at Sa Granja by 14:03, with 146 km still to ride and six and a half hours to ride them in. That is the trap. Those 146 km are the flat interior, they look free on the profile, and they have to be covered at the same 22.1 km/h as the mountains, into whatever the afternoon wind is doing, eight hours into the day. Riders rarely lose the 312 in the Tramuntana. They lose it on the part everyone assumes is a formality.

Gearing, against this route’s actual gradients

The 312’s advertised average gradients are gentle and irrelevant. What decides your gearing is the steepest continuous kilometre on each climb, which this project measured from the organiser’s own track: 7.5% on Puig Major above Gorg Blau, 7.2% on Coll de sa Pedrissa, 7.1% on Coll des Grau de Superna, 6.9% on Femenia and Galilea.

If you are hiring a bike, the cassette is the specification that matters. Ask for the sprocket count in writing before you pay, not the frame or the groupset tier. A hire fleet’s default 11–28 and its 11–34 are the same rental price and a different race. Two things a rider needs are not machine-readable and are therefore not stated here as fact: the organiser's intermediate cut-off times, published only inside an annual course-guide image, and the bike-hire partner's own terms — arrivocycling.com returned HTTP 403 to our fetch on 2026-08-05. Airline bike-carriage fees are excluded on the same principle: the airline sites defeat automated reading, and a stale baggage fee is worse than no fee at all.

The limit is longer than the day

How we got this 06:30 to 20:40 is 850 minutes. Sunrise 06:55:51 to sunset 20:35:37 is 819.8 minutes. 850 − 819.8 = 30.2. Civil dawn is 06:28:42, two minutes before the gun; sunset is 20:35:37, four minutes before the cut-off.Computed from the organiser's published 06:30 start and 20:40 finish cut-off, against sunrise/sunset for 24 April 2027 at the start line.Computed 5 August 2026.

The 312's time limit is 14 h 10 min. On race day 2027 there are 13 h 40 min between sunrise and sunset. The limit is 30 minutes longer than the day — a rider using all of it starts two minutes after civil dawn and finishes four minutes after sunset. A rider anywhere near the limit rides the first twenty-five minutes before sunrise and the last five after sunset, on roads through Sa Pobla and Muro that are open to traffic. The organiser’s regulations already warn about unlit tunnels on the MA-10 in the morning. Lights are not luggage on this event; they are the first and last half-hour of it.

You cannot eat what you burn

Eating well on the 312 still leaves you in a deficit of three to six thousand kilocalories, which is why the event is decided in the last third and why the riders who fade are rarely the ones who climbed slowly. The organiser signposts every feed station a full 10 km in advance — eight of those warnings appear on the 312 track, the last of them 10 km from the finish — so you always know how far the next one is. What that does not solve is that 60 g an hour is a rate you have to practise, in training, at race pace, for months. Nothing about this table is fixable in April.

The four numbers to leave with

1. 23.8 km/h moving, if you intend to stop for an hour. Not 22.1.
2. 08:48 at km 50.7 on the limit line — if you are behind that early, the day is already going wrong in a way the flat will not fix.
3. A 34-tooth chainring against at least a 30, unless you can hold 3 W/kg deep into hour ten.
4. Lights, because the limit is half an hour longer than the daylight.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 5 August 2026. Next review due within 60 days.