After creating so many Rebel Routes over the years, including the Summit City Velodrome, I smiled when I saw Zwift’s new Cirque du Suffer route in Paris:
50 laps around the Arc de Triomphe… was this for real? Yes it was.
By now, many of you have already ridden this route. It’s an easy ride (flat and short) after all. After reading various comments on Zwifty forums and overhearing chatter around the Arc de Triomphe, it’s clear that feelings are mixed:
When I rode it, I had a few thoughts:
- This will be absolute mayhem in a scratch race, with riders lapping each other. It could get really interesting with a small pack.
- I wonder why they didn’t make this a looping (lappable) route?
- How much distance could I shave off by steering to the inside of the circle?
It’s that final question that I’m addressing today.
Steering vs No Steering: Distance Comparison
Most Zwifters with a steering device already understand that steering can shave distance off of your ride if you do it right – or add distance if you do it poorly. Just like outdoors! (Back in 2020, Bo Oxlund tested steering on Alpe du Zwift and determined that steering the optimal line shaved around 500 meters off the overall climb’s length vs no steering.)
On a route like Cirque du Suffer, where steering to the inside clearly shortens the distance, it’s not a question of if steering shortens the course, but by how much.
I ran three tests:
- Steering to the inside for the entire ride
- No steering at all
- Steering to the outside for the entire ride
And here are the distance results, taken from Strava since Zwift only displays distance to one decimal place:
- Steering to the inside: 17.88 km
- No steering: 18.49 km
- Steering to the outside: 18.99 km
Without steering, the “track” around the Arc de Triomphe is ~370 meters long. But if you steer to the inside, it is shortened to ~358 meters. And if you purposely steer to the outside (or just get stuck out there due to poor pack positioning), the track is lengthened to ~380 meters.
That means a non-steering rider on the middle “default” track would need to travel 3.35% faster than the steering rider on the inside in order to match their event distance. Or to put it in more practical terms, if the steering rider is racing at 45 kph, the non-steering rider will need to ride at 46.5 kph just to keep up.
Steering vs No Steering: Experience Comparison
But distance and speed aren’t the only things to consider here.
In a typical Zwift race with drafting enabled, riding in the draft (presumably the longer “non-steering” track) would be more efficient than riding without a draft on the inside track. It might be fun to take on the non-steering peloton as a solo rider steering to the inside, but that will be a tough race to win. I do, however, predict we’ll see races on this course turn into a battle between two groups: steering riders on the inside against non-steering riders on the outside.
In a TT, where drafting isn’t a factor, steering to the inside will simply be a massive advantage. At 45 kph, steering to the inside will save a rider ~50 seconds across the full 20.9 km Cirque du Suffer route. (TT races often have steering disabled, perhaps for this very reason. But I’m of the opinion that we should generally allow steering throughout Zwift, since it’s part of the game and people have paid for the hardware.)
Lastly, it’s worth noting that constantly steering on Zwift is a bit of a pain. It’s not like outdoor riding, where the difference between steering your bike onto the slightly longer or shorter tracks around the Arc probably wouldn’t be noticeable. On Zwift, it requires near-constant steering, since the game will auto-steer you back into the draft if it detects no steering input after a short period. So there is a bit of additional work involved in sticking to that inside track… unless you set a box on the corner of your Zwift Click controller to hold the button down for half an hour like I did for these experiments.
Questions or comments?
Those are my thoughts. But what about yours?
Cirque du Suffer. Love it? Hate it? Want to race it? Share below!
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