UPDATE: I misunderstood something I had seen online and had thought virtual shifting was through the directional pad on the top of the left-hand play controller. This is incorrect. I finally just tried it yesterday, because it was one of those rare times I’m on Zwift and not racing, so I could afford to play around with stuff. Turns out (silly me) the virtual shifting buttons are those tiny sliver buttons next to the steering paddles. I tested this out for just a few minutes, but it seems cool enough to try in my next race. It also would solve my problem of accidentally hitting the brake while shifting, since I won’t be using the mech shifters anymore. I can reach the play controller shifters both in the drops and on the hoods, so I’m looking forward to trying this. I think it has the potential to take the play controllers from somewhat cumbersome and in the way to actually quite nice to ride with. Although I would, personally, still like a sprint trigger for power-up. I want to be way down in the drops and hit that thing at just the right moment instead of having to reach the top of the controller to do it.
OLD ILL INFORMED POST (PLEASE DON’T RESPOND TO THIS PART SINCE I MISUNDERSTOOD SOME THINGS): I’ve tried many different positions of the Play Controllers for racing, pretty much all of which are sub-optimal, but the current best I’ve got is to have them just under the hoods. The problem is that I’ve found it fairly easy to accidentally tap the brakes while mechanically shifting my integrated shifters (SRAM). I never want to brake for any reason.
On the flip side, I’d like to use virtual shifting on my Kickr Core, but I need to be able to shift in a sprint position with my hands in the drops for maximum leverage. I do not want to take my hands off the bars to shift which means the d-pad on the top of the controllers is useless.
So here’s an idea–allow me to swap the braking functionality for virtual shifting functionality. I can still reach the bottom of the orange paddle with my index fingers in sprint position, so I’d be able to shift while sprinting AND I wouldn’t have the issue of accidentally hitting the brakes.
Or better yet, just let me tell Zwift what every button should do and I’ll set it up optimally for my own use case.