Just by chance we had been up the Col de Rates the day before. There is an ingenious time trial system installed at the foot of the climb. You take a card, date and time stamp it then race to the top to a second machine where you stamp your arrival time. You can leave the card in their post box and eventually your climb time is posted at www.stoppomat.com
We weren't that fast going up but I calculated we were five time quicker coming down :-)
