New Giant Gravel Crushers race series. Looks fun!

in case you didn’t get the email yet:

4 weeks starting 1st June. 2 short (10-15 minutes) races one after the other (2nd race starts 20 minutes after the first). Points table on ZwiftPower (nice). And you can unlock the backwards cap.

You can sign up for the first race but it doesn’t say what course it’s on. I wonder if we get to see that new Gravel Mountain course.

Looks like existing courses only, but hopefully James does a few switcharoo’s to the existing schedule when no-ones looking.

Should be good with the points table.

Just not much choice of times, just the one day a Wednesday morning, or evening, really getting annoyed with this on zwift, the fondos this year were sparse, and difficult times here in the uk, quite fancy these, but just not much choice of times. then when it comes to tour of zwift etc, it’s non stop everywhere.

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Initial screen “blurb” makes out that riders can choose which category to enter…
When in fact on the signup screen, as it should be as the system has now been around for ~3.5 months, Category Enforcement is in effect.

When are we going to get race series where racers that aren’t on Zwiftpower cannot join races where league points are on offer?
I shouldn’t need to have the memory of an elephant to know that Jim just ahead of me is on ZP and currently has more league points than me, but Fred and Dave ~5 seconds further up the road aren’t on ZP at all, so trying to catch and pass them isn’t going to give me more league points for the race. In another scenario, Fred and Dave could be stronger than Jim than I, but Jim has managed to stay in their draft and is pulling away from me.

Specific stages in ZwiftHQ events could be put on that advertise that non-ZP riders can join, or better yet, everyone gets a Zwiftpower account. Or use some visual clue to show non-ZP racers and make these riders operate outside of the drafting physics, encouraging them to register at Zwiftpower for “proper” racing.

Probably later on in the year.

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Another thing I’d like to see in this respect is that if a race says a heart rate monitor is required, if you launch Zwift to do the race and you either don’t have a hrm or your one is faulty, you are advised of the issue and you simply cannot enter the race, or your avatar shows a visual clue for others and you are either removed from race after after x seconds or you get removed from drafting physics.

I shouldn’t need to slog my guts out chasing down Jim and seeing him have a massive effect on the race dynamics, thinking this will give me a better race results position (and league points in a series), to then discover Jim wasn’t wearing a hrm and is excluded from the race results because the rules said hrm was required.

Could equally apply to races where non-smart trainers are excluded from results etc.

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Pretty much covered on what I touched on earlier. We’re looking at the ability to give event organisers the ability to prevent people on zpower or don’t have an HRM paired to enter an event.

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I’ve not looked carefully further ahead, but 1st June 1830 BST does not have an “open” race 1, it has two “women” race 1s (but second one listed at Zwiftpower does not produce a sign on sheet). There is an “open” and “women” race 2 at 1850 BST. :wink:

I was wrong. This was not fun.

I guess if you like hills it might be fun. I don’t like hills.

Next week is going to be an interesting exercise in time management.

The first race is on the Kappa Quest route which is two times up the gravel climb on Yumezi. We did the Kappa Quest Reverse route as the second race tonight. It took the top A rider 23 minutes to complete the second race. I imagine the normal Kappa Quest route will take around the same time.

Race 1 next week starts at 6:15pm.

Race 2 next week starts at 6:35pm.

Can you see the problem Zwift?

There’s a 20 minute gap between start times for the races. It takes the best racer about 23 minutes to do the first race.

As a joke, in the start pen of the first race I asked “what happens if the second race starts before I finish the first race?” I guess we will find out next week won’t we?

Week 3 has a similar issue with the 13km Spirit Forest route being the first race.

I just hope these are minor scheduling mistakes and won’t be the final routes. But if not:

Embrace the chaos!

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I think I fixed that last week.

I’ll pass your feedback on to the person responsible for building these events. I just program what I’m given.

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I think the person responsible for building the events saw the route lengths and forgot about the 5km uphill lead-in to the actual start of the route. Plus the fact that they are hilly, gravelly routes which makes these races slower than normal.

Having said that I see 3 people in C cat and 12 people in D cat couldn’t finish the first race (which was just the 5km lead-in) within the 20 minutes.

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Yep, that’s also my assumption. Thanks for flagging it!

I’ve stretched this out by 20 minutes to give everyone a chance of finishing the first event.

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Apparently these races weren’t setup to unlock the backwards caps either.

#EmbraceTheZaos

Why is the Category Enforcement only for the open races and not the women’s races in this series??

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On the topic of this series… Could anyone explain to me why myself(and a few other riders) were not included in the primes data? Event that I am talking about is this one: ZwiftPower - Login. Reason why I am asking is because I didn’t get a Zpower points from this segment, and it was definitely one of my fastest in the last 90 days…

Any idea when the points result will be working ?

For such a prominent announcement I haven’t seen any follow up on this - am I the only one not seeing the points awarded ?

I’m looking at the ‘Giant Gravel Crushers - EMEA’ tab on ZP - (can include a link - not even to ZP itself, heavy sigh).

It just shows as ‘Loading’ on any current browser on macOS.

Sorry - Let me update these.

They are up -thanks