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Hi there, firstly love zwift its amazing :slight_smile:

Requirement/ user story. " i want to be competitive in the category i am assigned to, as it maximises my enjoyment of zwift"

  1. normal B cat, generally i can stick with the group until the end, but dont have a lot of energy left for a sprint ( this is fine :slight_smile: )
  2. future works anti sandbagging, I am generally competitive in these, top 10 at worst top 5 is good
  3. auto cat( assigned B) , i came 96th in a recent chase rase, dropped after 15 mins, this wasn’t fun and quite demoralising, even on a bad day i should on a flat course of been able to hang on for at least 20-30 mins ( ftp 330watts 89kg)

in short, auto cat doesnt seem right for me, nor the other 80 riders that finished either with me or behind me

hope this is helpful

all the best

Lee

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I did also attend one of the AutoCat Chase races (ZwiftPower - Login), and noted a few things:

The B category for the first CET race was quite big, but there were 0 racers in E cat. I do also think that the B cat had a too wide spread of abilities. It would be nice if they could have used all A-E cats to make the B cat smaller on both ends.

There was also a guy 115kg putting out huge watts at the front. He was doing constant intervals, moving up to the front and off the front, staying there, sliding back, and repeating. I see that he is filtered from the result with a 20min badge in ZP. I think he increased the pace unnaturally for the group.

I did a DNF when there was no air left (struggling with a cold and asthma) with about 10k left. I averaged about FTP for the whole race, so for me, this was on my limit. I would probably have been able to hang longer without the health problems.

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(Replying as James, not Zwift)

I know you can match me on the flat and the one Chase Race I entered we had an enormous group at the front and category seemed to be well “matched”.

I normally struggle to hang on at the front of B races (as you both know!!). But was able to just hang on at the pointy bits of that race.

The empty E is intentional when there aren’t enough really top end racers.

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By looking at the results list, I see that of 153 finishers, there are about 50 in the front group. Then some smaller group of 10-20 races after that. There is about 6 min down to 141 and then some that just rolled in.

This is a flat course, so pure watts is king here. 20 min W/kg is probably around 4 down to place 80 or 90, and avg watts is around 300+ down to place about 75. That is pretty hard to for a ±50 min B cat in an A-D category race. I’m not sure if I can agree that it is well balanced either.

Why is E used only for the few elite racers? It would have been more useful if the A-D could be distributed to A-E.

@James_Zwift It could be just me that is sick and out of shape and spends my time whining in forums when I get dropped :wink:

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