The London course’s “London Loop” route takes you along the Thames, down through underground tunnels, and up the Box Hill KOM. If you take the reverse route you will ride up “Fox Hill” which is a shorter, steeper climb than Box Hill.
Route details:
Distance: 14.9 km (9.2 miles)
Elevation Gain: 220m (722′)
Strava Forward Segment Strava Reverse Segment
Take a video tour:
The London course’s “London 8” route covers the entire original London course by combining the “London Loop” and “Classique” routes.
Route details:
Distance: 20.3 km (12.6 miles)
Elevation Gain: 238m (780′)
Strava Forward Segment Strava Reverse Segment
Take a video tour:
As we predicted, Zwift HQ launched the long-awaited Prudential RideLondon course late last night. It’s beautiful! The rain shining on the streets is an especially cool effect, and the occasional thunderclap certainly wakes a bloke up.
We are busy creating Strava segments and compiling details for the various route options on the new course, so stay tuned for those posts. There are five different route options:
Here are some photos posted by various Zwifters over on the Zwift Riders Facebook group:
The much awaited release on Zwift’s London course happened late Wednesday night (July 27th) here in California. Zwift HQ had this to say:
Over 1000 hours of artist time has been lovingly put into the map to make our version of London, and we think it shows. A little over 12 miles (nearly 20km) of new roads are available initially, including a copy of the infamous Box Hill as well as the full Prudential Ride London “Classique” course. All roads are u-turn enabled so feel free to ride in any direction you wish.
Read the full release announcement here >
Zwift Academy now has 1111 riders enrolled. Enrollment ends July 31st–learn more at zwiftacademy.com.
Here’s the recent Facebook post from Zwift HQ:
The folks at Zwift HQ have been testing the new London course and posting the rides to Strava–here are links to recent rides from Eric Min, Jon Mayfield and Mike McCarthy and Matt Antoniou.
Based on Strava’s data we can ascertain a few tasty details about the soon-to-be-released course:
Zwift HQ is staying tight-lipped about a release date, but since the Prudential Ride London race is July 30-31st, my guess is the course will be released sometime between late this Wednesday and early Friday.
Last week Tacx released a major firmware update for their flagship Neo trainer which allows it to emulate the “feel” of various road surfaces such as cobblestones, plank bridges, and gravel.
This is made possible by the Neo’s innovative motor which adjusts the resistance on your rear cassette 1000 times per second. Because the adjustments can be made so rapidly, various “surface profiles” can be utilitized which give you the pedal feel of different surfaces.
Here’s what Tacx says about it:
Road surface simulation
The NEO is the only trainer with road surface simulation, allowing you to experience the feeling of riding on cobblestones, gravel, off road or other types of roads, all while you are indoors. You feel the vibrations of the road surface in your legs, exactly the way it would feel outdoors. This entirely new feature can be used with some Tacx Films when you ride in our virtual worlds and with Zwift.
This feature simply makes Zwift more immersive, and that’s a beautiful thing. Of course, you have to be pedaling to feel the surface emulation: unlike riding outdoors, you won’t feel the various surfaces when you are coasting, and you won’t feel the different vibrations through your seat or handlebars.
The reviews I’ve seen thus far have been quite positive. Some Zwifters, however, have requested the ability to turn the feature on or off because they want the smoothness of an indoor ride.
Here is an thorough review from DC Rainmaker >
The Neo’s main competition is Wahoo’s Kickr (although Cyclops’ new Hammer will also begin competing in this space soon.) While many people love the Kickr for its rock-solid reliability, it simply isn’t capable of this level of road surface simulation since it uses a belt system for resistance.
Will Neo’s new road feel capabilities unseat the Kickr as (arguably) the most popular high-end trainer? Probably not, but anyone who doesn’t yet own a high-end trainer and is looking for an immersive experience will certainly be attracted to the Neo. Because of this, I predict Wahoo will release some major Kickr firmware updates or a new Kickr version soon.
Tacx’s video introducing this new feature:
Everyone’s favorite Lama Shane Miller discussing the new feature:
Tacx Neo Intro Video:
Zwift HQ pushed out an update on 7/22 which fixes a few bugs and adds some minor improvements.
See the official update announcement with a detailed list of changes here >
The day before stage 10 of the Tour de France, Michael “Bling” Matthews of team ORICA-BikeExchange tweeted a question about joining a group ride on Zwift, as he hopped on for a ride during his rest day.
Anyone now how to join a group ride on @GoZwift im on my rest day at true tour de France and trying to find a group
— michael matthews (@blingmatthews) July 11, 2016
(Incidentally, we’ve got a post covering how to join a group ride–it’s easy!)
The next day Matthews got into the break along with two teammates (Luke Durbridge and Daryl Impey) and a few other strong riders including Peter Sagan, Edvald Boassen Hagen and Greg Van Avermaet.
The ORICA-BikeExchange trio worked their team advantage perfectly, placing Matthews in an ideal position for the win. He executed a fast and precise sprint to take the stage.
More and more pros are using Zwift–it was even featured in the TdF newscast. As Zwift HQ’s Charlie Issendorf likes to say: “Zwift now, win later.” (Note: this philosphy also worked for Matthews’ teammate Matt Hayman who won Paris-Roubaix after a month of Zwifting earlier this year.
JZRA (Jones Zwift Racing Association) is the brainchild of brothers Tim and Arnold Jones (read an interview with Tim here). Besides organizing races themselves, they also put together the first-ever ranking scheme for a multiple-race season on Zwift, helping to transition Zwift racing from a single-race focus to a full-season focus, much like outdoor racing.
Beginning with the Zwifta Bianche on January 28, 2016 and ending with yesterday’s ZTR, the race season included 42 different race events such as KISS, ZTR, dZi Summit Races, and more.
View the first season’s results here. Results are available by rider, team, and nation.
Here is a summary Arnold posted at the conclusion of this first season.
Starting by saying a huge well done to our top 3 riders, Frank Garcia (Team X) is our first champion, Quentin Lafaye (PTz/Vision 2) a worthy second place and Mark McIntosh (Team X) was Mr Consistent throughout the season to take 3rd.
Congratulations to Team X who stormed away with the team win with 4 riders in the top 5, and I say a begrudging congratulations to the USA for beating the UK for the top spot in the nations rankings! (but seriously well done USA)
3710 individual points were scored, Frank Garcia actually had 9.84% of all the points on offer. The top 5 had 26.7% of all the points.
Most wins: Lafaye: 7, Garcia: 6, Schumm: 4, Louge: 3, Little: 2, Schmidheiny: 2 and Kuhn: 2
Huge thanks to Glen Knight for bringing KISS in and Christian Wiedmann for bringing in ZTR and Frederic Jacquemin and co for the dZi Summit Races.
Special shoutout to Alex Callejo who upgraded our spreadsheet to a super-savvy version to help us keep it all under control, without it there would be alot more errors and alot more time required to input the points.
Also James Hodges for Zwift power and his and Glens hard work on the logger And thank you to anyone who showed up to race, we like organising stuff but that’s no good if there’s no one to organise it for.
Please do check out the post in the KISS Zwift Road Race group specifying details of the KISS/ZTR league that will be filling in for us over the next 6 weeks if you need your fix of points.
So what of next season? Well it will kick off on 1st September. With hopefully more counting events and an improved ranking system with separated categories in parts, points to all finishers and a more competitive system (we hope). We’ll reveal specifics nearer the time.
We’re open to the idea of welcoming a sponsor for the next season and put their names to the rankings. We wouldn’t ask alot in return just to supply some prizes for the overall winners. If you have a product/charity/organisation/company or anything you want to advertise please drop me a private message and we can talk about it.
Now this one I’ve mentioned before but we’re hoping there is some interest in riders forming a race team for the JZRA (although it might not be called JZRART as that’s a bit of a mouthful). We’d be open to having any category riders hoping to build a core before the influx of new Zwifters over the winter. Again if this interests you please do send me a private message and we can talk and gauge who’s interested.
In the summer we think we’ll be having a “Race to the Beach” in August, a fun race without points with a different finish line: The beach on ocean Boulevard of course! Very summery, it’s always sunny on Watopia (unlike the UK I must say!)
And the next TTT we will announce now, and it will be in align with an event recent announced by Tam Burns (see Zwift riders) and if you’ve seen his post you may realise now that this means it will be a World Championships Edition! Details will follow and don’t worry there will be opportunities for everyone to race it.
This September Tim is off to university and since he does the bulk of the work with JZRA (in the background!) it’s likely it will be going with him, I’ll still be invlolved and around and most certainly watching intently as the season unfolds but he will become the main man as he should be and I will be taking a slight step back.
Well done you made it to the bottom of the post congratulations! A special well done, I would give you a point or 2 but it’s a bit late! See you at the Race to the Beach 😀 and we look forward to next season!
