What Zwift setup do you have?
Go to ADZ - the MTB should feel really slow.
If I’d normally do 47-49min with an SL8, the S-Works MTB is 53min or more.
It’s all about the effort I put in regardless of the bike as I see it. I did the tour fever climbs last week, there is about 100 mtrs difference on the longest two, both average 8%. One took 1hr 28 the other 2hrs. Same bike but I just felt better on the Hautacam & I did that after the Col du Madeleine.
I couldn’t even keep up with Yumi the other night on my level 4 Safety bike; the gap is real.
However Vee is talking about top end bikes that are maybe thousandths of a difference in Cd with equal rolling resistances etc. and is at the lower scale of speeds, where as mentioned, the gap won’t be as big.
That said, you race on a Safety or Buffalo and see how long that lasts compared to one of your upgraded or high end bikes and you’ll notice the difference instantly.
Worth noting the BMX is basically just a clone of the Classic if I recall, or the Carbon, ie: there are worse choices than the BMX by a large margin, so the BMX shouldn’t be generally considered as “bad”, as it is indeed just a clone (of which, again I’m unsure of)
I trust the data more than the perceptions. It’s slower than all road bikes by a significant margin.
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I always hate looking at the mega lists and not everything is listed, I think he does this on the BMX because it “doesn’t use the default Zwift wheels” (which again I think is a lie, just not visually).
Okay so the BMX is actually a lot heavier than expected (to be fair I probably have less than 30 miles on the thing, I never used it except immediately after unlocking it, then once after that)
It should be noticeably slower on the climbs; it’s almost 2x time wasted compared to the Buffalo (unexpected for me).
That stated; I see now why my perception of the Buffalo is where it is…
The BMX is “fast” on the flat; so it’s actually “aero”, but super heavy. It basically ties the speed of the default Carbon on the flat, where the Buffalo is nearly a minute behind. I’m also intrigued to see the Buffalo and Safety are quite different, as personally it doesn’t feel that way, but so be it.
(I’m having to dig into Eric’s spreadsheet numbers to see this for the record)
I should go through these datapoints and do a more clear % gained; could be interesting to see what bikes increase in performance the most.
Reviewing Eric’s spreadsheet though it should be reminded to take his data with a fat grain of salt.
He’s got the Steel and Safety and a few other frames listed twice, and the data points don’t match. edit - I see what’s going on, the top must be 300w and bottom 150w; it’s just not marked.
Worth noting however that things within a few seconds of each other could be inaccuracies of auto-steering, hence the ‘grain of salt’ approach.
I am shocked how heavy but aero the BMX is. Strange choice; I guess that was to make it a reasonable “cruiser” choice; which is funny that it’s actually faster on the flats than the Atomic Cruiser by a fair margin.
My experience with correcting errors in Zwift Insider is that Eric responds pretty quickly and is grateful for feedback about mistakes.
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It’s more of just the standards of testing can’t be 100% accurate; I presume Eric isn’t doing these tests with steering enabled and constantly trying to stay on one side of the road.
The time saved by steering can be pretty dramatic in some cases like ADZ, which isn’t accounted for and hard to say how much % of error range there is on his tests (I realize they’re tested in an offline mode, but we all know how weird autosteering can be even with no one around).
A reminder that BooX added 600 meters on ADZ alone doing apex vs outside line with a test from 5 years ago; and I assume that didn’t include the newer lanes; meaning it could be more today.
Regardless, not what I expected with the BMX going into his test results. (again, why all bikes aren’t listed on his performance charts despite having the data for, I don’t understand)
With that said, at lower power levels and lower skill level rider races, it might come then as no surprise the BMX would seem fairly on-par with other users not going for the fastest setup available… but as soon as that race involves a hill (which as we all know is super uncommon in Zwift’s public racing calendar), it would become evident pretty quickly how poor it is.. probably.
Depending where you steer as well and not allowing automatic steering to put you on poor lines in places. It will put you on steeper parts of the road if you let it. It’s not as obvious as the climb portals where you can see 20%+ on the inside of others, but still noticeable.
Every little bit helps to get a fast time on ADZ.
When I had was unlocking the project 74 the last bike I used was the S-Works MTB. Once you got it up to level 3, it didn’t seem terribly slow uphill - but it just didn’t have a high top speed, aero or rolling ability seems poor.
I don’t have a fleet of bot riders to test these however…
My best time with that was 52min something. Not something I intend to do often.