Since the implementation of races with a race score limiter, it’s been a real challenge for myself to find any race. I only am able to ride from 6-10pm pacific hours due to work and other real-life responsibilities. I understand why the limiter was implemented, to consolidate competition to have larger higher racing score races. However I have not been able to race in over a month and my race score hasn’t changed since my most recent FTP test.
If you open the companion app and look for these hours, there are maybe 1-3 races during any given 2 hour riding window. More often than not these races are capped at 700, 800, 850 race score. Luckily right now there’s TDZ going on, so I can ride that and go hard in an event with other riders. But it would be nice to be able to find a race at these hours.
It’s also worth noting that the very very few races I am able to find end up being a Zwift racing club one where it has 1-4 people in my category.
I want to also put out there that before this ‘limiter’, finding an “A” race at my riding hours was not an issue. Sure they weren’t as big as a prime time A race, but usually 15-30 people would show up, not 1-5. I believe this is because those riders are forced into riding earlier in the day, and those who cannot ride earlier (or even later) to find a race without a cap end up just not racing like myself.
Please Zwift, I just want to race from time to time
I’m in almost the same boat. Even with a (comparatively paltry) score of 802 there are literally zero races for six hour periods.
Lots of those periods come at times when I’d ideally want to be racing - like before work.
Before the cull / scoring system I could normally find something.
Race populations were fine, but now you can say “no one races” because there are no races. It’s terrible product management. There are five options. They are so bad for Zwift that you’d think they would reconsider;
Use TP Virtual, where you can create your own events or race against bots based on your power profile.
Create a second zwift account and lie about your weight to be able to race in a B-D cat. ZRS is pretty broken, so you’ll probably stay in a lower cat as long as you start there.
Reset your ZRS by canceling your account and then reinstating it while your Zpower connection is offline and your Zpower account is deleted. You will lose your Zpower history.
Quit zwift for a period of time then come back in a lower category. Again you’ll probably stay there because ZRS progression is broken. Quitting your main account and starting a second for 90 days is a combo option, or use a different platform in the interim.
slowly sandbag out of the top cat.
The Zwift platform only gets worse with each of these options.
Alternatively… what if zwift had a race you could enter every 45min to an hour. Imagine
The other option is into look at community organized races that do not appear on the companion app and require registration to receive a race pass.Yes, this makes them harder to find initially but on the plus side, they tend to be well organized and decently attended. There are folks who can share more about these options, but here is a link I just posted to a couple.