I’ve been on Zwift for close to 18 months and I really enjoy it. A couple years ago I could not imagine riding on an indoor trainer for more than 20 minutes, but after relocating from California to Vermont, I knew I had to figure out how to ride indoors. It turned out to be a life-saving change that has become my primary training mode.
Looking for new things to keep it interesting, I wanted to learn how to organize events on Zwift, so I approached Gordon Sloan of Rhino Racing to teach me the basics of event organizing. He generously agreed to take me on as an apprentice and let me experiment with one of the team’s longstanding event series: Rhino Racing Crit City.
It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, so race field sizes are down. Zwifters love short criterium races, so turnout for the Rhino Racing Crit City events has been pretty good. However, we haven’t put much effort into developing these events to maximize participation. I wondered if there were changes that would increase race entries without abandoning the riders who already enjoy these events. We started by creating a design document with ideas for improvement.
Our Goals
- Increase participation and compete with more popular events on the calendar such as the ZRacing Monthly Series and Zwift Crit Club which are organized by Zwift HQ. We don’t expect to beat the field sizes in those events, but small increases would be a win.
- Increase racers’ awareness of the Rhino Racing club and attract people interested in team racing. The off season is a good time to start talking to riders about team events that dominate the fall and winter racing calendar in the northern hemisphere.
- Retain both casual and devoted racers who participate in the events we’re currently running.
The Strategies
We kicked around ideas to meet the goals we discussed, and arrived at this approach:
- Vary routes and distances each week. Currently we simply alternate between the two Crit City routes, Bell Lap and Downtown Dolphin. These are very popular criterium routes, but maybe adding a little variety will increase the appeal.
- Don’t change too much. Keep the short scratch race format. We want the events to appeal to both casual and dedicated racers, but maybe a general classification competition for the series will help.
- Solicit feedback from racers about the routes and the races they enter. Most Zwift races don’t try to involve participants in the planning process, but maybe we can learn something by surveying racers about their preferred routes, distances, and race times.
- Write a better race description. The text that racers read about our Crit City events is minimal, so we’re wasting an opportunity to promote the team and increase engagement.
- Put more effort into promoting the series through social media channels and popular sources of race information such as Zwift Insider.
Starting With Racer Input
Since these are short races, expected to finish in 20-30 minutes, it helps to use routes of 5km or less so there are some laps. The development process began with a survey on the Zwift Forum asking racers to vote on their favorite short criterium routes (the survey is still open and we’d love to hear your input).
The survey results showed that Crit City remains popular, but it’s clear that Glasgow Crit Circuit is also a winner. That route didn’t exist when we originally set up these events in September 2022. To avoid losing the racers enjoying the Crit City events, we settled on a rotation that includes 50% Crit City routes, 25% Glasgow Crit Circuit, and 25% other popular short routes.
We’ll rotate the routes each week, and run the series over 12 weeks to give us some time to understand the effects on participation. A racer’s best time on each week’s route will count toward the general classification over a four-week period. After four weeks we’ll start a new ZwiftPower league to produce a new general classification for the next four weeks. After 12 weeks we’ll reassess the design and decide to either continue or make further changes.
Analyzing The Calendar
When we introduced the Rhino Racing Crit City events, Zwift had recently replaced their Crit City events with the ZRacing Monthly Series. Despite the success of Zwift’s new series, many racers were disappointed by the loss of Crit City events. We stepped in to fill that gap.
Eventually, Zwift introduced another series, Zwift Crit Club. Aside from small differences in the number of laps, there isn’t much to differentiate our events from the Crit Club events. Their events benefit from greater name recognition and nine races every day. Our existing events are scheduled on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with two race times on each of those days, plus one more on Friday. We need a few more race times, including some on the weekend.
The Negotiation
The Zwift events team manages the calendar for public Zwift events, so I approached Zwift’s main event planner, James Bailey, to get his feedback on our series design and race times. He suggested adding a race time that would be more appealing to riders in the Asia-Pacific region, and he agreed to create events on Saturday.
Although the calendar is pretty packed and race entries are down, we’ll host four races per day on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, at 9AM, 11AM, 8PM, and 10:30PM UTC. Hopefully the availability of Saturday events will help riders who want to compete for GC rankings despite the large gaps in our schedule. If we get enough entries we’ll be in a better position to ask for more race times in the future.
Once events are created, the organizer has control over route selection, distance, race format, and other configuration settings without further interaction with the Zwift events team.
Our Experiment
We want to see if racers find the route choices and series format appealing. Will we get more race entries by adding Glasgow Crit Circuit to the rotation? Will we get more repeat entries by adding a general classification element? Will casual crit racers join our team? Will the race schedule changes help?
We developed another survey to get more detailed feedback from racers about their experiences in the events. Most Zwift race organizers don’t ask for participant feedback in the event description, and it’s often difficult to know how to contact the organizer. We’re making that easy because we want the feedback and we want to adjust our plans based on that information. In addition to the racer feedback, we’ll review the number of event participants to understand if the changes are working.
Series Starts August 12
On Saturday, August 12, our Rhino Racing Crit City events will become the Rhino Racing Crit Series, with a week of races on the Glasgow Crit Circuit! In week 2, we’ll be back on Downtown Dolphin. For week 3, our flavor of the month will be Neokyo Crit Course. In week 4, it will be Bell Lap. Then we’ll start a new GC competition for the following 4 weeks.
You can find the full calendar of Rhino Racing Crit Series events at zwift.com/events/tag/rhinocrits
Will these changes increase field sizes in our events? If you join one of our Crit Series events, please fill out our post-race survey and let us know how we’re doing. If you want to chat about our series design, drop into the Rhino Racing Discord or leave a comment below.
I think there’s a lot of races and that makes people race “more and more alone” with 3/4 riders. Maybe you can take your results using zwift offical races like zracing or something, but only the ones registed on your championship counts… maybe this will get more people racing together!
I don’t think Zwift provides a way to do that. But our current race entries are a lot more than 3/4 riders in B and C category, sometimes more than 30 (many are casual racers who don’t show up in the ZwiftPower results). A and D category numbers are often quite low because there aren’t as many of them. My hope is that the work to promote this series will help, and getting to the end of summer in the northern hemisphere should as well. We just need more rain!
As a Rhino member, great to see the club “out there”. Having hosted an outdoor weekend with Gordon last week, it was great to meet the man and get to know a bit about him and the club. I will definitely give these a go as more my style.
Really interesting, thank you. I hope whoever it is that organises the huge number of 3R races on the schedule reads this – some of them haven’t changed in years
I think there are far too many races at the moment. Sometimes there are 7 or 8 races starting in a 30 minute period and they’ll only have 50 or so riders between them. This means there are no good races when there could have been 1 or 2. I think James Bailey said he was going to remove some of the poorly attended races for this reason. I think 1 or 2 per half-hour should be the max and just delete the rest. Sounds brutal but I think it would greatly improve the race experience for everyone. NOT a… Read more »
Selfishly, I want the Rhino events I’m working on to be among the survivors if there’s a purge. Part of the problem is that the ZRacing series sucks up a huge portion of the traffic and it’s hard for a community series to compete with that. They have loads of race times, and effective promotion. I want to find out if there’s anything I can do to make this little community race series more appealing by tweaking the design and increasing promotion.
Not everyone can ride or has the time to race when you want to race. There’s nothing worse than logging onto zwift, and finding out the next race is like 40min or and hour away. remember the time you have will be about 40min -1.5 hr after the start time, so waiting for that 40+ min then 1 hr race, turns your session into a 2 hr ride. not great if the time might be after 9pm, or you have other commitments (and a life). More races regularly is great, and suits anyone at anytime. just because only 8 signed… Read more »
The problem is really A and D categories. If you have 8 riders in A category, you’ll have 30-50 in C category. If you have 8 riders in C category, you may have 0-2 in A category which is too small. As a C category racer I care only about my own experience and I’ll happily race half a dozen people, but as a race organizer I care about every racer’s experience and desire to enter my events, so I want the As and Ds to be happy.
I enjoy the really big fields of 50-60 riders, they seem to break up and form little groups and breakaways…
Small races of 3 or 4 in each cat are cool because you get a decent opportunity for a break ( that very rarely works.)
Its the mid size groups that are dull because its generally a parade until the last half KM.
Since these races are short and pretty flat, successful breaks are not that common, though sometimes there’s a winner who jumps from 1km out. But it’s also affected by Zwift’s pack dynamics, and this series is using the new PD4.1 settings, which does make breaks more viable because the chasers have to work harder to bring it back. If you haven’t done an event with PD4.1 I recommend trying it and changing your assumptions about breakaways a little bit. The group may not just magically pull it back if nobody wants to work.
I like everything except the time-based GC, where you’re at the mercy of the time zone you can ride and who else shows up. I liked the Chasing Tour method; just count the time gap between each rider and the winner of their specific race.
Points-based also works and has a similar effect
Thanks for the feedback. I believe the Chasing Tour method is implemented outside of ZwiftPower so it’s not an option for us but we’ll discuss if any of the other available methods would work better. We’re repeating the GC every 4 weeks so we could change it for round 2.
There are a few leagues on ZP with points structures. Here’s an example – https://zwiftpower.com/league.php?id=960
Points based has the opposite issue in choosing a quiet zone is easier to win and therefore get more points.
Chasing tour will suffer inbalances as well if you ride in an easier zone it will be easier to get near to the winners times.
I don’t think there is a perfect answer when you have rounds with multiple time zones the races will always differ but I like the idea of GC time as it makes riders to continue to push knowing that every second counts.
I would never consider races <30 minutes (unless they come in multiples, like the Tiny Races). That is just not worth 'wasting' a race day on.
So I hope that – at least mid-term – you will also branch into 45-75min races, and preferable the occasional extra long race.
I also prefer long races and we’ll discuss possibilities for that. Attendance at the 40-50km KISS events looks decent so we might look for openings in the schedule for similar events. Attendance at the extra long events like KISS 100 is often really low since there are not many of us willing to be on the trainer for 2.5 hours or more. As we get into colder and wetter weather in the northern hemisphere that will open up more possibilities as people return to the platform.
Sounds great.
The extra long races – as you say – would be more an exception and/or something for ‘high season’. And even then, you would probably need to limit it to less time options.
Typical Crit style races are not long in nature. They are more geared toward the shorter efforts typically between 30 and 45 mins. The professionals do however race up to an hour or so but most community races that are Criterium styled are shorter by nature.
As these are full gas Vo2 style full on racing, I use them as part of a training programme. Did this yesterday after a 100km endurance ride. No reason why this cannot be different to other style of races which riders may want to then use Pacer rides before/after and incorporate into longer rides rather than change the format. Zwift Insider are good if you want to race all 4. I don’t so this suits me better. There are enough other styles and lengths of races. I think this could be a niche series.
Top idea, Paul. I very much hope to have a crack at these.
As a somewhat-regular participant in the Tuesday and/or Thursday races, I’m excited to hear about some of these changes. I like the GC aspect of it, even if I know I’m not going to place well. It’s still a nice incentive to try to improve month over month. And while I started racing the Rhino series in part because I was comfortable in Crit City, I like the idea of branching out to the other courses that fit the multi-lap idea. That’s one of the things I liked about the May ZRacing Series, and would look forward to here. Nice!
Looks good
Personally, I would like events where everyone had to sign up for Zwiftpower. I am a D cat and there are races where there are 10 to 15 of us in the pen. You battle with them all race. You then go to get race analysis of you and your opponents on Zwiftpower and their are only three other names. If you’re going to race you should be on Zwiftpower!
I agree but options for doing that currently are very limited and will tend to suppress race entries even more. What I’d like to see is automatically adding people to ZwiftPower when they enter their first race. Instead of having a separate opt-in for ZP, just have a button in the game where you opt in to racing when you enter, and get a ZP account with no further action.
Personally, I’d like to see more race organizers focus on helping to clean up data integrity issues. You guys may think that’ll thin your fields but you might be surprised. A lot of us are getting annoyed at racing against 60 year olds with vo2 max values over 75 (easy calc from 5-6 min power). And other weekend warriors who cycle a few hours a week should not have pro tour 1 to 5min power. How about setting up racing events that mandate dual recording with trainers set up as primary source… not some dumb PM pedals with juiced up… Read more »
Thanks for your feedback. You might consider raising this discussion on the Zwift forum. Most people on Zwift don’t have the capability to dual-record so I’m quite certain that would empty out our little race series which is already struggling for entries. But there is more we could do with the available tools (short of mandatory dual recording) and we probably will when more people return to the platform. For example we could forbid zPower riders from entering the pen. A lot of what needs to happen to ensure race integrity depends on Zwift to enhance the tools. For example… Read more »
I did your Rhino Chase Crash in Sleepless City yesterday. There was a minor glitch at first that had me spawn with the race kit in Yuzemi on the road instead of Neokoyo in the start pens. I reloaded the race and got into the pens with a couple of minutes to spare. My question is what is this statement mean: No Zwiftpower Riders?
It’s “No ZPower riders”. ZPower and ZwiftPower are not the same thing. ZPower means using a speed sensor instead of a power meter or smart trainer to estimate your power. Those riders are excluded from the official results because their power measurement can’t be trusted. You can see which riders are using ZPower during an event because there won’t be a little lightning bolt next to their power in the riders-nearby list. Since you know they will be excluded from the results, don’t chase them if they go off the front. Thanks for joining our event and good luck at… Read more »
-No- power measurements can be trusted.
(on Zwift)