My first solution with one one arm was close to 1200 cycles. Throughout the week I managed to find some major but mostly just lots of small optimisations that steadily whittled this down to the 800 range. It got to the point where even shaving 2 cycles off felt like an achievement. 

I suspect there is some clever geometry I am not seeing to get the track loop even shorter, or a more effecient way to drop the odd-one-out products, but I'm pretty happy with this. My guess is min will be high 700s