You can work out the cutoffs. The hard part is working out yourself.
A brevet gives you a closing time at every control and one at the finish. Whether you make them depends on a number nobody hands you: the speed you will actually be holding at 400 km, in the dark, up a hill, eleven hours after the last time you felt good. Time in Hand works that number out and plans the ride against it.
It tells you your speeds, rather than asking for them
You describe yourself once: the speed you hold on a flat 200 when it is going well, how much a long day takes out of you, what hills cost you, and what you lose riding through the night. From that it builds a speed for every leg of the route — decaying with distance, adjusted for the climbing in that leg from your GPX, and again for the hours that fall in darkness.
The result is an arrival time at each control that is about you rather than about the rules, set against the official closing time so you can see the margin. That margin is the thing the product is named after, and it is the number that tells you whether a forty-minute stop at 300 km is a rest or a mistake.
Every default it starts from is published, with the arithmetic, on how the model works. Nothing about your pace is a black box, because a number you cannot check is a number you will not trust at 3am.
Where the sleep goes on a 600 or a 1000
Above 600 km the plan stops being about speed and starts being about when you stop. Put four hours in the wrong place and you arrive at a control after it has closed; put them in the right one and you ride the second half as a person rather than as a problem.
Place a sleep stop anywhere on the route and everything after it moves — every arrival, every margin, and the point where the plan is tightest. You can see immediately whether the sleep you want is a sleep you can afford, and where the ride would let you have it instead.
And what happens when the ride ignores the plan
It will. You will lose an hour to a mechanical, or the wind will be from the wrong quarter for two hundred kilometres, and by the third control the plan you printed is a plan about somebody else's day.
So the plan replans. You stamp the time you arrived and the time you left, and it tells you how you are actually going against how you said you would — you are riding about 14% slower than your profile — and works the rest of the ride out again from there. It does that on your phone, with no signal, at a bus shelter at half past three in the morning, because that is where and when it is needed.
And it prints to an A6 card you can laminate, with a column to write your real times in. The card carries every official closing time, and those are the only numbers you are actually held to.
Getting the official times right is the floor, not the point
The opening and closing times come from ACP's own bands — 34, 32, 30 and 28 km/h for opening, 15 km/h for closing to 600 km and 11.428 beyond it — with the first-60 km relaxation and one rounding, to the nearest minute, applied once at the end. Every figure this produces is published and checked against the sources, control by control, on the verification table.
That earns belief rather than being the reason to be here. It matters most above 600 km, where the closing band changes and a single average speed cannot express it at all.
Start with the free planner
Import your GPX or type the controls in, and you get the full official schedule for any distance — opening, closing and latest safe departure at every control, the elevation profile, your own per-leg speeds and rest, and a printable card. It asks for no account and nothing leaves your browser.
Plan a brevet now — it is the same page this site opens on.
The paid version is what adds the personal model, the sleep placement and the mid-ride replan. It is not ready. Paris–Brest–Paris 2027 qualification runs from roughly November 2026 to June 2027, which is when most of this gets used in anger, and the box below is how you find out if it is there in time for yours.
Tell me when the paid version lands
Tell me when the paid version is ready. That is one email, once, and we delete the address when we send it. Nothing else is ever sent to it.
What we hold, and for how long, is in the privacy notice.