Different FTPs, but same gears?

General Discussion
1

So, people with different FTPs share the same 24 virtual gears.

For me the standard gear on flat is 13, or 14 when I push harder, then 15 or 16 downhill. I never use 17-24.

On the other hand, on a very steep gradient, I reach 1 and 2.

Someone with a higher FTP might cruise at 16 and so have more range on the steeps.

Should there not be a settings when I can tweak the range of the 24 available gears?

If I could shift the flat gear to 16 (or even 18), that would give me a much better range on the low gears.

I doubt I share the same gears as Ganna on a road bike!

2

trainer difficulty

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3

That doesn’t address the question since Trainer Difficulty has no effect on flat roads. I do not know if virtual shifting’s inbuilt calibration process at the start of each ride does anything to address this. Would be interesting to hear if it does.

4

true, but sounds like he is running out of gears on the steep grades, so it would help there.

5

OK yeah lower Trainer Difficulty would result in using a higher gear on the climbs and a lower gear on the descents as the hill is flatter.

6

Trainer difficulty reduces the total range of gears needed. And I am not asking to change gear less frequently.

Let’s say one uses 4-18, then a lower difficulty would mean maybe 7-14, or so.

And if would be almost the only solution if I were already using 1-24.

I’d like to move 1-16 up to 8-23 so I have 7 more low gears to use.

Given the asymmetry of gears, it feels higher FTPs have effectively more gears to chose from.

7

Isn’t that available if you select the Climbing range of gears rather than the mixed terrain?

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8

Are you using the Cog? If not, and you have a regular cassette, can’t you just let the trainer calibrate when you start up, and then shift your mechanical real gear 3-4 times to an easier gear?

9

I have the problem other way around. Gear 24 is not enough on high speed sprints and sprints slightly downhill. I use my gravel bike and Zwift Cog. A possible fix would be to use big front chainring but this makes it way more noisy and rough. Small chainring is so smooth and I would like to keep it there.

10

Similar to my question/suggestion above, in your case couldn’t you just shift to the big ring temporarily for a sprint and then back again to the small when you’re done? Basically giving you an extra 3-4 larger gears for a bit? Or just shift the rear cassette to bigger gears if you want to stay in the small front ring if you need something past gear 24?

11

I don’t really know anything about the virtual gears, but with Wahoo trainers if you change the “wheel size” in the Wahoo app it changes the baseline 0% grade resistance the trainer uses.

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12

Sten,

Don’t forget that you can adjust the “offset” on your cog to get a better alignment with your front chain ring, which will resolve your noise issue. My old school road bike has a 3x front chain ring, so for normal riding / workouts I use the middle front ring and a cog offset of 5, then for races I use the big front ring and increase the cog offset to 10 to re-align the chain, which reduces the noise again.

13

Audetto,

In your game settings switch from synchronous gearing to the SRAM style as mentioned above and then pick between the gearing options (flat, climbing, all around) that best fits your needs. That should give you the different gearing spread that you are looking for.

Cheers

14

The article is very clear, that sequential really only works with mixed terrain. Otherwise gears are not uniform.

I need to try the wheel circumference, unless it changes rolling friction.

The easiest solution would be to add a multiplier, 0.7 to 1.4, that I can choose in the ui.

15

Shimano ultegra di2 offers 52/36, 50/34 and 46/36 chain ring combos and 11/34 or 11/30 cassettes. So that’s what you have available irl, most people buy expensive trainers that are able to simulate steep grades of at least 15%. Why bother getting an expensive setup that tries to mimic outdoor riding if all you want to do is spin at a constant torque. You could just get a cheap spin bike without automatic resistance and hook that up to zwift, voila….

16

Does this change baseline resistance on Zwift because when I asked Wahoo they said Zwift controls that and not them.

17

I never asked to change less, rather to change more gears. Problem is that they don’t exist.

In the same way as I do not mount the same combos as Ganna on road, I’d like to customise my gear range on Zwift.

18

My point was that there isn’t an unlimited gearing range available irl either.

19

Because at least the former option gives you relatively accurate power reporting, unlike the spin bike option.

20

The zwift virtual shifting gear ratio range is 0.75 to 5.49. Basically a 30/40 to a 55/10. The range is bigger than any groupset available, and covers the gear ratios that both you and Ganna would use.

I do however agree that there should be a way to tweak the baseline resistance, but the main use case for that would be for people whose bike only has a small chainring, but whose trainers don’t support zwift virtual shifting. They should be able to give themselves a virtual big ring so that they’re not spinning out all the time