Yesterday I shared some Crit City sneak peeks we’ve seen on social media this week. But just a few hours ago, Zwift CEO Eric Min shared the biggest leak yet–a Strava ride on the new map!
Here’s a little analysis of what we see there…
The route is ~1.9km (1.2 miles) long, with just one small rise. That rise is around 400 meters long, and averages perhaps 3-4%. Perfect for a crit course that needs a little something spicy to break things up!
Based on the picture Eric uploaded, we can see where the start/finish is, and see there is a lap timer as well as a KOM jersey awarded (Eric has the mixed leaders jersey for fastest lap and KOM in his screenshot below):
We can also see some fun imagery in the screenshot–Scotty on a bike, a big screen with Zwift video on it, Zwift popup tents, and more.
Where in the World?
In terms of GPS coordinates, Crit City is located 188km from Watopia. It’s on a small island called Tinakula, which is northwest of Teanu where Watopia resides.
At that distance, it’s highly unlikely these two maps will ever be connected.
When?
In the past, Eric’s Strava teaser rides have always come just a day or two before the new route is released. So I would guess Crit City will go live today or tomorrow, but there’s a big gotcha…
Event Only
Certainly this route will be event only, like Bologna. It’s so short, if a few thousand riders were all on it at once it would be a zoo! So we’ll have to wait and see when the first events are scheduled.
See you on the new course… soon!
OMG – yes that would be so awesome. And not that hard to code i think…..compared to some other requests.
If you zoom in on his route it is shaky and not a smooth line like most gps tracks. Steering?
For this to be really nice zwift algorithm would need to mediate/reduce speed out of the corner based on how tight the corner was and how many riders were simultaneosuly on that corner. That would create a much more involved feeling of crit races. We would have to accelerate back to speed based on the rider weight, people would try to make strategies to arrive first (or not) to the corner as the ones that go first can pick the perfect line and lose less speed due to that. That would be awesome!!
400m 3-4% rise? That’s sort of comparable to the rise in Greater London Flat except even shorter? My guess it won’t matter at all, of course the efforts will come with much less time in between but I don’t think it’s really gonna shake things up. What would be nice however (like someone suggested on Eric Minn’s Strava profile) is if Zwift decided, for this event course only, to really slow down riders in the corners meaning you’d have to do sprints after every turn just like in RL crits. Now THAT would change things up from just sitting on… Read more »
Would this be designated as world #8 in the prefs.xml file, so I could world hack it and ride it anytime? Always looking for something new! As an interesting aside, if one were to do 100 laps on this course, it would be close to a 200K distance ride. 100 laps is usually seen for auto races, especially for short tracks!
It’s an event-only world, so you can’t world hack it. Same as Bologna.