Maybe someone can explain to me how a 49kg rider can win a flat race on the ‘Hell of the North’ cobblestones, averaging only 219 watts? With second place weighing 63kg and third 60kg - are these riders not just too light and not powerful enough to be at the front on this terrain?
Not taking anything away from these performance, these are impressive watts/kg numbers from guys with elite race scores. They were the best.
I totally get that Zwift isn’t meant to be ‘just like real life’, but surely on this terrain absolute watts trumps power to weight ratio and being incredibly light is a disadvantage?
On the cobbled sections I was pushing 450-500watts and was struggling to hold the wheel of guys who look to be doing 300-350. Anyone know what is happening here?
I have raced IRL on cobbles, and being light is really not fun. Absolute power is king and if you are light your back wheel bounces all over the place and you lose traction.
50kg?? It wouldn’t be safe to hit the cobbles at speed.
Other than the vibration feature on trainers that have road-feel (and everyone turns that off after 5min), there’s nothing to cobbles in Zwift other than increased rolling resistance. Rolling resistance both in-game and in real life is proportional to weight.
In Zwift, lighter and shorter riders have a much lower aero resistance. In no terrain is it a disadvantage to be lighter Zwift other than a steep descent, and even there the disadvantage is less than IRL (other than that corners don’t matter much)
Perhaps, but on cobblestones IRL the riders who can lay down the most power tend to be fastest. Power is everything, riders don’t bother getting aero (for a start you can’t ride safely tucked down with your wrists on the bars), and if you are light your back wheel doesn’t get enough traction on the ground. Heavier riders dampen the vibrations and thus transmit more power from drivetrain and wheel to the road surface.
A 50kg rider winning a cobbles flat race on Zwift with 220w, dropping an 80kg rider doinf 350w is as crazy as a 90kg rider doing 350w beating a 60kg rider doing 300 watts in an uphill race.
It’s like saying Marco Pantani could beat Johan Musseuw on the cobbles because he’s more aero dynamic and has lower rolling resistance.
While this is 100% true within zwift physics, I think it’s important to recognise that under the w/kg based racing categories the advantage heavier riders had from being allowed to produce more raw power more than offset any disadvantage from the physics model.
It’d be amazing if zwift could work out a way to make performance over cobbles reflect real life. No idea how though
I don’t know why we need to acknowledge that when Zwift and the community have largely moved away from the w/kg categories. Other than ZRL, w/kg categories are relatively rare in community races and aren’t use in Zwift races. I think at this point ZwiftRacing.app 's vELO has produced better categorization than Zwift’s ZRL implementation.
I’m not arguing with you. I’m not making any statement about how the game should work or what happens IRL on cobbles, I’m talking about how it does work.
We can discuss about wether cobbles are well simulated. But what is this crap about not being safe to hit cobbles at speed at 50kg. I have been riding and even racing on French cobbles many Times, i am 54 kg and never fell.
You don’t need weight to pass the cobbles. You need dexterity, low tire pressure and high power relatively to your frontal area
Maybe things are different now with wider, tubeless tires at lower pressure. In fact, I am sure they are. (I still ride inner tubes)
But when I was racing everyone just rode 21mm at 8 bar, and as a lighter rider your back wheel would bounce all over the place. Plus, to match the speed of the 80-85kg specialists you’d need to ride at a higher RPM in a higher gear, as you can’t match their absolute watts, this would mean your chain is under less tension and would jump around more, which is also less safe.
Keeping the front wheel straight, while also your hands relaxed enough to ‘go with the flow’ is also harder if there is less downwards force on the ground from you and the bike.
I do agree that things have changed a lot with wide tires… and about the way to ride : I let the bike float, I don’t use gloves on paves and don’t get any blisters. I have been racing for example the malteni a few times, that’s 250km and a lot of pave sectors, no blister! But that only works on dry cobbles. On wet and muddy cobbles it is way more dangerous.
Real world metal mirror surface crr : about 0.004
Real world smooth asphalt crr : about 0.005
Real world rough asphalt crr : about 0.007
In short, zwift In short, zwift only exaggerates the roughness of the road surface.
This is also the reason why Zwift’s lower categories have a fat advantage.
That’s one step towards realism.