British Hour Record holder and performance engineer for Ineos Grenadiers, Dan Bigham, will attempt to break the official UCI Hour Record held by Victor Kampenaerts.

The 30-year-old, who juggles his own racing with his work for the British WorldTour team, will attempt it on the familiar stage of the Grenchen Velodrome in Switzerland.

Last year, Bigum covered 54.723 km on the track in Grenchen, surpassing the British benchmark set by former Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins when he broke the UCI Hour Record in 2015.

Now, in 2019, Bigum will use the latest developments found at Ineos Grenadier and the form he honed at the recent Commonwealth Games to try to break the world record of 55.089 km set by Campenaerts in the high country.

"The UCI Hour Record timed by Tissot has been huge in my life for the last few years since I first attempted it as a student in 2014," said Bigam.

"With the support of my team behind me, I am excited to see what I can do against the clock again."

Bigam has had success in track racing and has made a splash in elite international time trials, but he is not a full-time professional rider. He races part time for road teams in Great Britain and the UK, and uses his educational background to work as an aerodynamics consultant for various teams, including Jumbo-Visma, Canyon-SRAM, and the Danish track cycling team.

This year, after joining Ineos Grenadiers as a performance engineer, he opened a path to the World Hour Record, which had previously been blocked due to his non-professional status.

Last year, because he did not participate in the UCI's Biological Passport program, Bigum's hour in Grenchen was not officially recognized by the UCI and did not count toward the official hour record, even though he finished ahead of Campenaerts. He explained that it costs £8,000 for an individual to register for the UCI test pool, and a full-scale challenge would cost nearly £25,000 in total

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The partnership with Ineos Grenadiers opened the door, allowing the team to challenge the record with the best equipment, along with a team sponsor.

"Since becoming a member of Ineos Grenadiers, I have progressed physically. With the amount of work I have to do, it's nice to have everything I do in one place," Bigam said.

"With the full support of the team, I can better plan when and how I can train. I get to bounce ideas off of a lot of great people on the team, and they welcome me with open arms.

"Having access to all the partners in the team is huge for me. The support that Pinarello has poured into this project has brought an incredibly high level of new bikes to the world in a very short time. We also did a large amount of skinsuit testing with BioRacer over the past six months. It was really impressive and we feel we are in a very good position on that front. Some of the ideas we introduced into the whole package were out of the field but fully adopted. It was a real pleasure to be involved in this project."[27

Bigum will attempt the Hour Record Challenge on August 19 at the Glenchen Stadium, which is located in the middle of the key altitude difference.

In the velodrome at higher elevations, there is more oxygen to move muscles, but the thicker air creates more resistance.

Campenaerts set his current record at Mexico's famous Aguascalientes stadium, 1,800 meters above sea level, while Wiggins was near sea level in London.

Meanwhile, Bigum will run 450m in the same velodrome as last year. In this velodrome, his partner Jos Roden broke the women's UCI Hour Record, which was later broken by Ellen van Dijk.