Haven’t tried it yet, but has there been any improvement to that complete lack of draft you get when a big group comes up behind you and you try to latch on? In real life, racing on circuits with multiple races at a time, and where the men’s races would lap the women’s, I would have to actively try not to jump on the back of a fast moving men’s pack when they come past. As in, sit up and let them go. In Zwift, if I see a group coming up behind me and I don’t ramp up my power so I’m doing only about 1mph less than they are by the time they reach me, they will blow past without the slightest bit of draft.
This is my number one complaint as a fairly light A-level female rider: any group rides/races dominated by men (pretty much all I ride on Zwift) means I invariably end up between groups when dropped on descents or whatever. And it’s really really hard to latch onto a group coming past because it’s like no draft exists for me until I’ve already been sitting in the pack for several seconds. Why doesn’t a group catching you SPEED YOU UP as they come past you, as it would in real life? Why doesn’t a group catching you trigger a pace partner type assist for a few seconds so you can jump on?
I looked at a local route, it’s a category 2 climb per Strava, if you go all the way up and then straight back down it’s about 105ft/mi of climbing, with no approach on either end. From my house doing it as a loop with a bit of low-grade approach it’s 73ft/mi. For a short approach to a 25-30min climb and back.
There’s a big mountain nearby and if I ride the same approach as in the previous climb I mentioned but keep going alllll the way up, get to the top, and then ride back home it’s 11600’ and 110mi - which is “only” 105ft/mi.
Triple Bypass in Colorado is “only” 91.5ft/mi and I don’t think anyone would call that “too flat” for a mountain ride.
I think you’re expecting too much climbing/distance for routes that don’t end on top of a big hill or mountain.
Sustained climbs are different than hilly routes, for sure. I’m not talking about actual mountain routes either irl or in Zwift. I’m talking about routes where the difference between the max elevation and min elevation isn’t much.
We may not be comparing apples to apples. I’m looking at Strava’s accumulated elevation / distance. Strava’s accumulated elevation for a ride adds up any part of your ride that’s beyond 2% gradient into a total elevation climbed. This is a different calculation than what Strava reports as “Vertical” for a segment which is just max elevation - min elevation. For all the values I reported above, including Zwift’s courses, I’m using Strava’s accumulated elevation for the ride / distance. Consequently, I just did our town Roubaix ride (a celebration of our gravel roads since we don’t have cobbles) yesterday that was two laps of the course. The reported distance 36.96 miles, elevation is 3855 ft (104 ft / mile) but the “Vertical” for the lap is only 566 ft (since the max elevation is around 1800ft and the min is about 1250ft). That was hilly. There is no flat anywhere and if you’re not climbing you’re descending. But there are no mountains involved, just rolling hills.
30ft / mile can’t possibly be hilly. If we assume you are climbing exactly half the distance and descending the other half then that’s an average gradient of (30 / (5280/2)) = 1.1% so I don’t see how we can be calculating the same thing if that was for a hilly route since a ride that is mostly climbing and descending shouldn’t show such a low average gradient. It can be dead flat for a long time and then have one climb, thus concentrating all that elevation somewhere along the route, but that’s not really a hilly route, that’s a flat route with a hill, like Milan Sanremo or something.
Supertuck required a bit of skill to use correctly. I’m fine with not being able to use it in the middle of the group, but I think it should be possible to apply when you have a little draft and are approaching a bigger group (higher draft). Whis would be possible IRL. When the draft is too big, it should be disabled. I know it is not politically correct, so don’t kill me!
Zwift Insider have put up an article on PD4 and TTT, although they have referenced double draft rather than the 1.5x that we’ve recently been told is used.
In Chasing Roubaix you had All riders visible and the Group got additional Draft when overtaking laped riders. It’s really hard to compare races not on the same Course…but it looks like there were more riders pushing over 5.0Wkg in Chasing Roubaix.
ZwiftInsider’s TTT speed test with PD4 appears to support this, as it shows faster speeds with PD4 compared to PD3 using the TTT formation that most closely resembles a mindlessly churning large pack:
Seems to me like people keep confusing PD4 changes for things that are resulting mostly from pack behavior. That Chasing Roubaix race was an absolute brawl through the whole race, with constant attacks and people pushing the pace the entire time. If the whole group is pushing hard, of course they’re going to go fast. Cycling 101
So PD4 works counter to breakaways in more ways than one:
By increasing pack speeds, if riders do steady state power at the front of the pack in order to prevent being slowed by the PD4 auto-brake and in order to prevent positioning issues, when the pack gets strung out.
By increasing the draft, which makes it harder to snap the elastic going off the front.
It’s a sort of reverse self-fulfilling prophecy, where the existence of PD4 changes rider behavior to work counter to the primary goal of PD4.
But pack behavior and a change in the meta-game is inextricably linked to the introduction of PD4, as PD4 incentivises riders to race in a particular way. It’s difficult to predict how this will turn out over time, but I would say there are sufficiently serious current issues to adjust the parameters already.
Well, the primary goal of PD4, as I understand it, was to "Make breakaways have a slightly better chance of sticking if the attackers work well together.”, so you might say that the “preference” of PD4 runs counter to the mentioned rider behavior. In other words, it’s not just that “some don’t like it”, as you say. The issues are much more fundamentally in conflict with the aim of PD4 itself.
What i would like to see in addition to autobreaking is IF a rider in Draft has a speed calculation lower that the rider with 0% Draft he should not be able to pass.
Zwift is always calculating riders speed from Watts and adding draft effect to speed calculation.
Example rider on the front is doing 240W / 3Wkg and rider in draft is doing 200W/2.5Wkg he should not be able to pass until his Power would increase above 240W.
Now a rider with 2.5Wkg will pass a rider doing 3.0Wkg and give him a small draft boost to speed him up.
