Your bike frame and wheelset choice both affect speed in Zwift, but your wheels affect it the most. While frame choice may change your 1-hour time by ~20 seconds, wheel choice can change your time by approximately ~60 seconds!
So go ahead and pick whatever frame you’d like. But make sure you’re running some fast wheels.
Wheel Tests – Introduction
While Zwift’s 4-star rating system for weight and aero is simple and easy to understand, performance varies even among wheelsets with the same star ratings–because the stars are just an approximation.
So we’ve ranked all the wheels against each other based on their actual performance on flat roads (2 laps of Tempus Fugit) and a long, steep climb (Alpe du Zwift).
Wheel Timings
This chart shows actual timings for flat and climb tests, in seconds. The shorter the bar, the faster the wheels.
Notes:
- Flat tests run on 2 laps of Tempus Fugit at 300 watts steady with an isolated 75kg rider 183cm tall, using the Zwift Aero bike frame. This test data is used for all flat results on this page.
- Climb tests run on Alpe du Zwift using 300 watts steady with an isolated 75kg rider 183cm tall, using the Zwift Aero bike frame. This test data is used for all climbing results on this page.
Percentile Rankings
Trying to choose a wheelset based on timing data can be a mathematical nightmare! Yes, you’ve got our timings above. But how much of your race is uphill, how much of it is flat, and how long is the race?
Percentile rankings make it easy to compare wheels against each other and spot the top performers.
Flat Course Performance (Percentile Rankings)
Climbing Performance (Percentile Rankings)
Wheel Percentile Rankings, Stacked
This format lets you easily see how wheelsets perform across both flats and climbs, and compare that performance with other wheelsets. This is useful for planning your race strategy.
Example: you want a top-performing wheelset for a road race up Alpe du Zwift, so you look at the longest bars. But you know the race will be won or lost on the big climb, so you go with the ENVE SES 3.4 wheels since they are near the top of the climbing rankings and also offer solid performance on the flats.
Your Feedback
We’d love to know what you think of these charts, including suggestions for improvements. Share your comments below.
Last chart of these new pages are the most useful thing so far in speed test area! Brilliant!
These charts are great. Thanks. Could we get more granularity on the X axis? Or maybe a dotted line at the 25, 50, 75 marks on the percentile charts?
Done!
Great job. Very useful !
This is awesome Eric. Thank you!
just bought a pair of Zipp 454’s!! lol
How do these compare with the tron bike?
We’ll be releasing charts for standard bike frames next, the Tron will be included. It’s a tough one to compare, because its wheelset is dedicated to the Tron frame, so you can’t separate the two and judge their performance independently.
The fastest bike frames coupled with the fastest wheelsets are a bit faster than the Tron on the flats, though. We’ll be posting about that soon as well.
Loving this. Would be great if there was a Level icon and Drops amount for each. Easier for people to quickly see what they should be saving up for based on current level or bank of Drops.
I’m level 20, with almost zero Drops, so if I want to upgrade my Zipp 808, ENVE SES 3.4 or Meilensteins, it’s easier to check rather than going in and out of every wheel choice in the Garage.
Yeah, I just haven’t figured out a way to display that with the charts in a way that is clean and simple.
We DO have this page which lists all that info: https://zwiftinsider.com/wheels/
I’m just about to do the same. Love your work, Eric!
He has a different post for that
This is the marketing hype machine hitting zwift. How to make people pay a tons of money for a negligible gain. Zwift performance should be about the cyclist not this bull. If course wheel makers are paying to get their product perform better in zwift. In real life if you are not racing, any good quality wheel should make you an happy camper. Use the saved money to make you an even happier camper that travels to ride his bike in wonderful places.
These charts are the best speed test presentation format on Zwift Insider. Would be great to get the same for frames!
Frames are coming next–just gotta finish the testing!
Cheers Eric for the link, great resource.
Hi Eric, thanks! Great stuff. 1 question i have: are the climbing times of TT frames and wheels realstic? It seems so odd the difference in time is so little compared to the extra weight. Example Cervelo p5 with zipp 858 is only 2 seconds slower in climb than meilenstein, while these are 6 seconds slower on the flat in Bologna. What is your view on TT frame and wheel performance in Zwift?
Using http://bikecalculator.com/, if I put in the Alpe du Zwift gradient and length, at 300 watts a 70kg rider gets there in 52.30 minutes. Make it 70.7kg (that’s about the real-world weight difference between wheelsets from what I can see) and that adds 24s.
Looking at our speed tests, the Zwift Aero bike gets there 14s slower on the 858’s. So not quite accurate, but not as dramatic as you’re saying. Not sure where you’re getting the P5 Lightweight result… I don’t see that in our list!
This is good stuff! Last week when I did the El Giro de Rigo, I decided to use the 454’s since it was up and down mid-grade climbs and rollers through Titans’ Grove and the Jungle a bunch of times. I think I made a good choice based on their flat/climb balance!
Is there any chance you could do a similar test for the best combination for riding on gravel. In particular the road to ruins or jungle circuit please?