Crit City and Slower Turns

Besides the “When can I ride it?”, I would like to suggest changing the tight turns to gravel. This will significantly slow riders down enough that they will have to accelerate out of the turns. I think a number of readers want slower turns for a crit course so it is more realistic. Otherwise, this is just a half version of Richmond Flat.

I invite riders to post their suggestions here when we finally get to ride this route. And feel free to comment on slower turns. I don’t want slower turns across all of Zwift, just Crit City.( Ever ride downhill on RGT? Every turn slows to a crawl down the Stelvia. It gets to be a pain compared to Zwift’s Alp.)

Are there any Crit riders here?

Yeah, I’m struggling to see the appeal of a Crit course with lots of tight turns, if those don’t make any difference to the actual ride. The whole point of a criterium race is knowing how to take corners at the correct speed, but if Zwift allows you to ride round hairpins at max speed without any drawbacks, they might as well have made the course one long straight!

3 Likes

I like the idea of lots of turns that you have to accelerate out of each time in order to keep up with the group. I often see people (including myself) on the london classique course swinging out wide of the group on turns and falling behind because they aren’t accelerating enough. It appears that you have to have lots of top end power to be a good crit racer as far as I can tell. I guess its a different kind of racing for people people with a certain kind of power profile just like a TT attracts people with another kind of power profile.

Note: I am not 100% certain that people swinging out wide on turns is part of a slowing effect that calls for acceleration but it seems like that is what is already happening.

You would actually ride a road bike which is fast overall by being fast on all the straights. Only the turns are gravel to slow the road bikes to mimic real life where you would need to accelerate from the turn when you hit the pavement once again. the gravel bike would be fast in the turn but much slower for most of the paved course.

Glad you would try it. Thanks.

I guess it is a lot about short little sprints out of the turns and whether you can recover before the next corner. I would give it a shot. I don’t recover too well but I can put in some short little sprints.

A good idea (@John Mayfield) ?

Zwift has all the elements to put this in place. Realism has its place in virtual reality racing. Let’s at least test it out.

And vote this up please. Click “vote” in top left corner. Thanks.

Beautiful graphics, Did not feel like a crit course, just another version of a small lap like LaGuardia. The graphics work is ‘spot on’. Great job there. An hour after the event only two other riders were still there, everyone else went off somewhere else. I took to my time trial bike but didn’t put any deep efforts in with the London Race on my calendar the next two days.

[quote]
.
[/quote] Claus Jensen

1h

I really liked it as well - I did a race in the counter clockwise direction and those small bumps right after the first hairpin was really nasty and a good place to attack.

Auto-braking in the hairpin would be a great addition. That would give another good place for attacking. It’s a Crit, we want constant action :slight_smile:

it wouldn’t actually need to be gravel just act like it i guess, might look a bit odd with gravel all over the roads!

2 Likes

I was thinking the exact same thing. It can look like normal tarmac or just painted road with the word "Turn’ and you just assign the program to the gravel code which would slow riders on the turn. Why aren’t we working at ZHQ?

1 Like

I did a crit race today and I love it the way it is.
You can’t mimic the turns anyway on rollers.

In real life you stop pedaling, and after the turn bring back the momentum by powering out of the turn. On rollers you just keep pedalling anyway…

It’s not perfect by any means, but the RGT free beta turbo app implements auto-braking and low power ceilings in many corners, something along similar lines in Zwift (especially for Crit City, but applicable to all routes) would be a real positive.

I think I am wrong about my previous comments about slowing going around tight turns. Maybe people swinging wide and falling back occasionally are simply letting power off of the pedals.

In my experience, if you accelerate out of a turn, you certainly appear to stay tighter with the bunch. If you don’t, you appear to swing wider. The latter seems to be the default position - if you maintain same speed you swing wider.

What I’m not sure about is whether that is just the view we all get of our own avatars but actually we all corner the same if we don’t accelerate, and join back up together after the corner.

Maybe it has to do with coming out of the draft momentarily when taking tight corners. That message always pops up and I tend to accelerate to bunch back up.

Like this idea. Nice thing about racing in here is no crashes. Could they just add difficulty around the second half of the turn, slowing everyone?

1 Like

Yeah, that could work a bit as well. Of course, I only want this slow turn feature on Crit City, not all routes.

Agreed. Are there other crit courses?

Yes I am.

My experience with the course is that the counter-clockwise version “The Bell Lap” seems punchy enough… On a trainer you cant really get out of the saddle and throw the bike around like you can outside, so getting TOO punchy just gets frustrating. The rolling climb means if you’re not on your power, you will get lost, especially with the gradient changing for smart trainers. The downhill in that direction is short, then the flat bit I’ll see an attack or two of someone coming off the downhill at speed, then it all starts again.

The course is more for a “rhythmic racing” than a true crit feel. The punchiness breaks up the norm of Zwift racing where it’s like a group TT.

Just my two cents.