Wahoo 10Hz 'Race Mode'

@GPLama has posted a great video on the new ‘Race Mode’ from Wahoo

This is going to cause a lot of issues for racing I feel, especially for TTT racing where holding a draft is paramount. Where a team with race mode, will have an advantage of a non race mode team due to being able to hold the line easier (I presume).

Would love to know the technical aspects of the whys and why nots it cant be on all power meters (with BLE)

I just watched that too, and it looks great to me (although I ride a Neo 2, so not directly useful). I’ve always been frustrated by the lag involved in riding on Zwift. Not just changes in power, but also the simulated gradient lagging behind the visuals of the game world.

This addresses the first for some users, and that’s good to see.

The Wahoo “Kickr Steer” is an interesting way of approaching that functionality too, but there’s no chance I’d pay £90 for a tilting phone cradle.

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Can the input be that accurate without a strain gauge? We can see that it does average out over a second.

the question now becomes, is it fair to race against someone who has the new Kickr with dircon 10hz Race mode enabled? Are we still on the same playing field?

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Zwift is inclusive, remember? We can’t deny people opportunities like that

we never were on the same playing field. all trainers differ in lag more than others which is why for UCI events they mandate the same trainers.

Wheel on are generally way less accurate than direct drive.

I don’t see any way to control it really other than at the A+/elite level with extra checks.

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Rather than the ‘fairness’ angle, I prefer to look at this as an exciting development in the indoor riding / esports space. These types of technological developments can only help bring the sport forward in the long run.

Although the benefit may be marginal (We’ve all learnt to accommodate the lag time anyway), It’ll be interesting to see how this is adopted across other manufactures and how it pushes standards/protocols forward.

Oh and I would be absolutely cool racing against someone that has Race Mode turned on… It’s up to me to know how to race with the equipment that I have. If someone has invested in the hardware that has race mode functionality and it is allowed within the event, then fair play… Outdoors everyone has different components (which can give small advantages) and Indoors we know that trainers and connections can vary anyway. :+1:t3:

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There are already so many differences in lag, accuracy etc. that this is not changing anything about fairness.

As Jon said is it just great to see actual development in a space which has pretty much stalled the last 2 years. Even more so is a signal for the other companies to actually develop their products, considering a company in financial difficulties is able to innovate while Garmin Tacx is treading waters, missing key features like wifi connectivity which is also the thing that makes race mode possible

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Yes of course there are already differences, but this new response time that Shane was able to demonstrate seems pretty substantial and clearly gives a big advantage (multiple bike lengths). I don’t know if this same test was ever done with a Tacx Neo 2 vs Kickr V5 for example, are the lag times of these two trainers really that far apart?

Its hard to do any direct comparison between two different trainers as you would need some bots to do that sort of testing. There is also a lot of other things there because of difference in responsiveness of a physical vs virtual (magnetic) flywheel.

The point was more that, i can’t see how this affects fairness anymore than the guy with a sub 20 ping vs the guy with over 200 ping. Or the difference in someone using a trainer with a claimed accuracy of ±1.5 % compared to ±1%. Even how near you are to the server, giving you a more correct position of your avatar. There are so many small things affecting it and this is just another one on top of that

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adding Kickr race mode to my list of excuses to why I lost the race

:wink:

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Very true. Try riding in another continent outside Europe or the US where the latency is much higher due to the distance and the number of router hops. The only way it would improve was if Google got into indoor cycling :grinning:

I haven’t watched the video but I’m really not getting why this is such a big deal.

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it probably isn’t. maybe if you lose by 0.05s to someone on one in a sprint you might be salty about your H3 or whatever for about three seconds

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Couldn’t you just respond by getting a trainer than gives “favourable” power readings? :wink:

For training, use an accurate trainer then for racing use the ‘racing’ trainer. :roll_eyes:

For these reasons virtual racing is a no-go for me.

Direct Connect is no use to me, I have original Kickr Bike so it won’t work. sigh…

Won’t this help the rest of us by our trainers not reporting our easing off of power in the bunch as quickly? In effect, Race Mode has handed everyone else a tiny bit of Sticky Watts by comparison, hasn’t it?

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I’d happily take this feature in any race that ends in a sprint. Which is most of them. Quicker reaction time would be a huge benefit if you are trying to stay in the draft until someone starts sprinting. Every trainer manufacturer should be working on delivering this feature.

There seems to be quite a delay in the power numbers dropping back down when Shane does his single burst pedal strokes while waiting in the pen. Gently rolling the pedals over at 80w then he does a single power stroke and it jumps to over 300w but takes a good 2-3 seconds to drop back down to 80w while it seems like Shane has eased off the pedals.

maybe but if you’re easing off before the line then you probably had at least a 1s gap anyway

I hope Wahoo make this available for the Kickr v5. It also has the ability to use Direct Connect so it’s possible.

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