Wiggins confident of beating Hour Record

Sir Bradley Wiggins remains confident of breaking cycling's famous Hour Record next month despite seeing fellow Briton Alex Dowsett raise the bar on Saturday.

Dowsett recorded a distance of 52.937 kilometres in 60 minutes at the Manchester Velodrome to beat the mark set by Australian Rohan Dennis in February, but Wiggins is confident he can go much further in his own attempt scheduled for June 7 in London.

"I think it still leaves me in the same position, I'll still go for the pace I've been training at," Wiggins, riding this weekend in the Tour de Yorkshire, told the Guardian.

"Based on what I've been doing in the last three weeks I should be quite a way ahead of that. We've been training on 54 [kilometres] dead as a guide but it could go one kilometre further or 500 metres shorter depending on conditions on the day."

Wiggins said he was unsurprised that the 26-year-old Dowsett, who has haemophilia and rode the Hour to raise awareness of the disease, had been able to beat Dennis' distance and become the latest rider to succeed since cycling's world governing body, the UCI, revised the regulations governing the Hour Record last year.

"A part of me thought if he's going for it he'd break it because he's quite calculating like that," Wiggins said. "He wouldn't have gone for it if he wasn't sure. He'd have done his homework.

"Everyone says how horrific it is - even Rohan Dennis said it was one of the worst things he's ever done - but Alex proved that with a pedigree in time trialling, like he said, it wasn't horrific."

Dowsett has already indicated he could go for the record again should Wiggins beat him in June, and that is a challenge Wiggins is up for. "I'd love to see Alex go for it at the end of the year," he said. "That's what the record is all about."