The Chasing Tour is a comprehensive racing circuit with a year-long calendar that follows the pro peloton tour, and was put together to build on the model of last year’s well-received “Chasing Yellow” event series. Throughout the year, riders can participate in 90 days of racing organized into grand tours, stage races, seasonal series, and single-day races that mirror the real-life races the pros will ride on those same days.
The Chasing Tour has a year-long general classification for individual riders and teams. The tour GC is calculated off a rider’s point accumulation across the season and a teams’ top 3 riders from each race event and GC competition.
Everything kicks off on Saturday, March 4th with the single-day race Chasing Bianche (52.4k/529m).
Compete when you want
Riders can participate in events whenever they want, riding as many or as few events as they wish. There will also be 4 time slots available for each race so riders from around the globe can complete at a time that works best for their schedule.
Competitions
Chasing Tour 2023 GC:
The individual rider GC is calculated off a rider’s point accumulation across the season.
The team GC is calculated using the point accumulation from a team’s top 3 riders from each race event and GC competition.
Race Events:
There are 90 individual event races during the 2023 circuit.
Riders are awarded points for each individual race event they participate in and complete.
Many of the individual event races are organized into GC competitions.
GC | Stage Race:
Stage races evaluate a rider’s combined time over the course of multiple stages (race events).
If a rider misses a stage they are given the last finishing time for the stage.
Riders must complete the minimum required amount of stages within a GC competition to qualify for GC competition points. This is generally at least 2/3 of the stages.
Don’t worry if you miss a stage, riders still earn points from the individual race events they complete within a stage race.
GC | Seasonal Series:
Seasonal event series evaluate a rider’s point accumulation across a defined set of races.
There is no minimum required race count with the competition to earn GC placement and points.
Scoring
You earn points in two ways, from individual race events and general classification (GC) competitions. The more you ride, the more you earn.
Race Event Scoring:
Points are awarded for each category and event time zone
Riders can complete the race in any time zone; its not required to always race in the same time zone
Only the first completed event for a specific race counts
Race event points determined by the race tier
GC Competition Scoring:
GC standing are calculated globally, not for each time zone
Points awarded for each category
Riders must complete min # of GC competition events to receive GC points
Team Scoring:
The top 3 riders’ scores from each event count
The top 3 riders from a GC competition count
Prizes
Tour sponsor, The Breakaway, will provide grand prizes for each main tour (Chasing Pink, Chasing Yellow, Chasing Femmes, and Chasing Red). Each 8-week or All-time PR earned on The Breakaway during each tour will eat you a virtual ticket for a raffle at the end of that tour. The more PR’s you get, the more chances to win!
For each tour, three winners will be selected at random to receive…
This sounds awesome, how will it work category wise? zp or forced Cat or? (noob racer here). I mean if you upcat in a race or mid GC? I am C almost B and hope to hit B in a few months?
Progress and improvement are part of the journey, so we look forward to seeing people upgrade.
Your Zwiftpower category will be captured at the completion of your first event within a tour in the season. So say you are competing in Chasing Yellow over 3 weeks in July and you start as a cat C and during week 2 you upgrade as to a cat B… in this case you will still be registered as a cat C.
We will take the stance that riders are here to compete and natural improvements will happen, and thats a good thing, and we will watch for those trying to game the system and will address that accordingly as situations arise.
Sweet, looks hard but I love the idea of a large scheduled multi stage / event Competition.
I am in! Just hope I make all the events. Thank you for putting the time in to organise something like this (and those who helped you of course).
Looks like a great series. Some of the events for a given stage are open category (E) and some are A/B/C where C is 1-3.2W/kg. Is that intentional? What’s the reasoning behind that setup?
The Zwift events team only had capacity to setup 1 time zone per race, so the other 3 time zones were setup through my club. Club events can be open for anyone to join, but the setup has limitations on multiple categories.
All events will have all riders riding together, whether thats in an A/B?C race or E race… everyone will be on the course together. Then at the completion of the event the results for all events will be auto-split into A/B/C categories using a rider’s Zwiftpower category so the end result is the same for all races.
Based on attendance within the tour perhaps the ZHQ events team would support more time zones for races later in the season.
Looking forward to this after FRR zwift grand tour ends. Local summer is normally a series of heat waves so this welcome to make summer riding more interesting then solo z2 multi hour base rides on zwift for CX season.
This isn’t something I will likely be able to participate in, but I’m curious…how are you going to handle time changes due to daylight savings time? In the USA time slots for example, will the start times change relative to GMT when daylight savings time kicks in?
Yea, 19:00 UTC would be awesome! As the times stand I can only make 13:00 UTC races but 19:00 would be give me 2 choices mid-week everyday. I am not sure however how that would effect the other time zones and will of course make every effort to make whatever is available to me.
Be interesting to see how others feel about it?
Thank you again for the efforts @jmorin
Thanks for the feedback. This is helpful info on the best time slots. I’ve started to make some changes to add the 19:00 UTC time slot. Changes will be sorted by EOD.
Most of the events are open category (E) with results sorted by ZP category afterwards, and some are club events. I’m not sure how it would be possible to use CE with that setup.
Fair, I missed that point. All riders starting together is good, nothing against this approach. There could be smarter ways to do the sorting afterwards though.
Ignore previous comment. This looks superbly organised so have passed on to the club.
