Today I organised a club event on Petit Boucle in France. Rubber band was on and there were 5 of us, all on road bikes (Tron etc) and putting out 2+W/kg. It was slow on the flats, 24-25km/hr max which was unexpected.
For the same W/kg we would each individually gone much faster on our own (like 30-31km/hr on the flat). It made it quite unenjoyable crawling around.
I’ve not seen this issue in meet-ups, so unsure whether it was club related or some other variable! Thought I’d mention it here and see if anyone else is experiencing the same.
I am helping my club organize Festive 500 events in Zwift again this year. In past years we used Meetups because we wanted rubber banding. This year since the rubber band was finally available for Club events we decided to use club events to make organizing easier (no need to follow the ride leader and you can have sweepers to help with communication if the leader is late).
We are experiencing the same speed limits. We usually cruise at 30-34km/h using banded meetups, but crawl at 25km/h in banded club events.
It would be great to get the physics of club events to match meetups (and every other event in Zwift). The current set up means the people that can put out more watts have to do that for longer just to keep us at 25km/h as we grind our way along the flats.
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Thanks Jack. We’ve gone back to using meetups to avoid this issue (and enable riders to load their workouts, another feature which we feel is missing in club events).
One of the riders on the ride described above mentioned to me that he was running Sauce at the time and could see the draft was zero throughout, which is interesting and I think would explain the speed experienced. (He was on a tron).
I’ve heard anecdotally this issue may be for small group sizes. Be interesting to hear if this was the case for you.
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The zero draft effect makes a lot of sense to me. We’ve seen the slowdown happen with groups of between 10 and 20 riders. Without the draft effect the rubber band would tie everyone close to the slower riders in the group. I don’t know how to check the draft effect amount myself, but I bet you all are correct about the source of this bug.
We’ll also likely go back to using meetups for most of our rides after this week, but I’ll miss having the sweeper beacon and the invite link.
Hopefully Zwift sees this thread at some point and decides to prioritize a fix. I feel like strong clubs support could help draw in more riders once their local club has a Zwift club.
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Pretty much experiencing the same in our club rides. We are about 6-7 riders and riding at 200W+ on 0% and not even going past 30km/h. Makes the ride pretty unenjoyable, considering we are all cyclist capable of right a lot faster at such power output.