Within a group ride today, I was starting to lose the main group. My avatar was caught in the draft of a rider that was most certainly getting dropped. That user’s w/kg was 1.6 at the time I caught eye of it. I was pushing 340 watts to break free to catch the group…so somewhere in the range of 3.5 w/kg or higher.
I could NOT break free from this rider.
Is this what others are referring to “draft locking”?
Sticky draft.
Is there a good technique for getting past a sticky draft?
I generally try to push harder or just maintain my higher watts till I get past.
Other times when I was the “sticker” - slow rider - it appeared some riders would back off and then speed up again to get past.
A few times I purposely tried to slow down to let someone pass and I seemed to just make them go slower.
Best is to just power it out. Or avoid moving back.
Sorry no good advice here just need some practice.
This is the single WORST feature in Zwift. They need to kill this feature or at least make it optional. It’s VERY frustrating to be motoring along at 40 KPH, then suddenly drop to 35KPH as a result of a slower rider.
Possibly not the response that you are looking for but if you have steering, then you can steer around people to dodge sticky drafts.
Conversely, it does make it harder to get in drafts that you actually want.
I hadn’t thought about that, but maybe I need to set up steering and give this a try. Thanks for the tip!
Ride a TT bike - no draft!
Here is how I see it:
If I am riding IRL and coming up behind another rider, if keep putting out the same (relative) wattage I will continue right on past them, without ‘sticking’ in their draft. And if I am coming up behind a rider and WANT to get in their draft, I will have to decrease my (relative) wattage to something less than what they are putting out.
So, why can’t Zwift make it such that if I am coming up behind another rider and continue at the same (or close) wattage, I just continue right on past the other riders? And if I want to ‘stick’ to them, I would need to decrease my wattage?
Maybe this is harder to implement than it sounds, but it seems reasonable to me, since Zwift knows your wattage, and also knows when you are coming up behind another rider.
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