This week was the 8th event of the Zwift Racing League – a team time trial over 1 lap of the fairly flat Watopia’s Waistband route. A fairly easy course to attack, but my team’s race was made more interesting by a bit of Zwift buginess and some less-than-ideal interactions with other teams. Read the entire sordid tale below…
The Start
We were using Google Meet for our voice chat, since some members have connection issues with Discord. (I warned my team that I’d be recording the stream, so they shouldn’t say anything too incriminating or explicit!) Soon enough Alex was counting down “30 seconds… 20 seconds…“
Then Justin (our Aussie, who whispers into his mic since it’s crazy early in the morning and he doesn’t want to wake up his kids) came on with 10 seconds to go: “I’m out of the pairing screen and pedaling, but my guy’s not moving.” Uh-oh. Justin is our strongest rider!
3…2…1… alright guys, go!
“I’ve got pedal assist,” Justin said.
Super weird. Somehow the game gave Justin pedal assist at the start, which worked out ok as we all got together and started riding quickly. Justin let fly a few choice words within a few seconds of the race starting, making the stream was officially explicit before we were even out of the start pens. A bit of a hairy start, but we settled in and started hammering out the miles!
The Dreaded Internet Drop
3.8 kilometers in, the rider list suddenly shrunk to just my name, and my teammates disappeared on screen. Nooo!!!
This is indicative of an Internet connection problem, and it meant the game wasn’t giving me any draft from my teammates. All I could do was up my watts to keep my speed up, so if connection came back I would still be near my team.
Fortunately, the dropout was short – just a few seconds. The rider list refilled, my teammates showed up, and I was still in the pack.
A Taste of Things to Come
We rotated through in our set order, each rider taking 30-second pulls unless they felt good and wanted a full minute. Justin felt good, and took 1-minute pulls almost every time! We were trying to hold 46-47kph, but our speed wasn’t great. Was the Watopian air a bit thick today? It also seemed like we were having a hard time getting into and staying in single-file formation, which meant we were wasting effort.
At 7.3km we passed one “G Zande” who promptly sprinted and grabbed onto our wheels. A big no no in a TTT! “Hey, what’s this guy doing?!” Alex asked. It took a few messages from us, and finally one from his team up the road, before he dropped off at the 9km mark.
It’s really bad form to grab the wheels of another team in a TTT – and it can get your whole team disqualified if it’s reported. Why is it so bad? Mostly because the whole point of the TTT format is to do your best as a team, with no assistance (drafting) of other riders. Sitting on another team’s wheel would potentially let them pull you up to rejoin your team, which is against the spirit of the TTT. Also, sitting on another team’s wheel messes up the rotation of the riders.
This was, perhaps, a foreshadowing of a bigger mess we’d encounter down the road…
A Messy Pass
We kept hammering out of the desert, through the ocean tunnel, up to the Italian Villas and over to the Volcano. As we descended to the start/finish in Downtown Watopia, Justin announced, “We’re being hunted from the rear.” What? A team had caught us? This hadn’t happened to us yet in the ZRL series – we had caught a lot of teams, but nobody had passed us!
Justin came over the comms: “Hold tight formation, let them past.”
So far so good. The chasing team was approaching, and we were easing up. This is all going along with WTRL’s rules, pasted below for clarity:
Overtaking Other Teams or Being Overtaken
Drafting from riders other than your own TTT team is strictly prohibited. When a team passes another team BOTH teams are expected to change thier riding styles.
- The Team being passed is expected to ease off on their power/speed once they know they are being overtaken. Do not fight them as they have made up a significant time difference to catch you up.
- The Team making the pass is expected to significantly increase their power as soon as they are near or in the draft of the team they are overtaking and maintain this power to create a significant lead. Remember teams are watching whats in front and not necessarily behind them. A friendly onscreen message of ‘team approaching’ can help.
By creating a significant wkg difference between teams, riders can avoid a sticky draft when passing – a dynamic game feature of Zwift.
You may encounter dropped and rogue riders from time to time and they should not “join” your team or interfere in your TTT formation in any way. Please ensure you provide at least 3 warnings via onscreen/direct messages to any interfering team/rider and if they do not back off, please contact WTRL Race Control after the race to report them. Many teams are streaming or recording their rides and we are watching too.
My team all eased up on the power, but we were moving pretty fast (52kph) on the descent to the line, and the other team wasn’t coming around! 15 seconds after we eased up (it feels like an eternity) Alex came on: “Just keep going, guys. Let’s keep doing our thing.”
Now we had a decision to make. Do we hammer down, possibly violating the rules? Or do we stay eased, hoping the other team comes around? Clearly we weren’t winning first place since we were being caught by a team that started 30 seconds behind us… but we didn’t know if we were in 2nd or 22nd at this point.
Happily, their first rider came through our group, which made the decision for us. They obviously intended to ride through, so we would let them do so. Justin took the lead position in our team, wanting to make sure we let them all get through. “Just leave it with me until they go past.”
I had eased up on my power, but was dragged to the front of our group by the draft of the Team Vegan as they came through. They only had four riders left, but two of them flew off the front of their group, leaving the other two to chase while we sat languidly in their wake.
“They’re waiting, like they’ve dropped a guy,” Justin said. But there weren’t any Team Vegan riders chasing! And we had a decision to make. It had now been 1 minute since we eased up on the descent to let Team Vegan pass, and they were just 1 second ahead of our group, still trying to regroup, with us still eased on the power. How much more time were we willing to lose in order to let them overtake us cleanly?
Our patience was quickly evaporating. “Fellas? Vegan…. going?” Justin messaged. No response.
We started hammering again as we hit the incline before the left to Ocean Boulevard. Now the goal was to overtake Team Vegan and regain the time we’d already lost. Teammate Snowy busted through, with me on his wheel, and the rest of us hammering to get through. But Team Vegan wasn’t having it – they kept hammering too. And as we began the slight climb up to Fuego Flats, both teams were jumbled together, and confusion reined.
Thankfully, Team Vegan finally moved to the front, and we eased to let them get away. (I think we all figured they were lightweight riders and could get away on the climb!)
The Finish
As the ground leveled off, we were only 3 seconds behind Team Vegan. Clearly our 6 heavier riders had more pure watts than Team Vegan’s 4 lighter riders. Would we overtake them before the finish?
Our team captain Snowy messaged, “Coming past. Please do us same favor we did you.” But they didn’t write back, and didn’t seem too ease a bit. I was on the front pushing hard, with Monica yelling in my ear.
“Come on, come on! Dig deep! Keep it up!”
We hit the sprint start line for the final 400m and I shifted and stood, hammering with all I had to overtake Team Vegan just 1s ahead. I was leading out my teammates who were on my wheel – suffering and maxed out, but loving every minute of it!
We crossed the finish line with our 4th rider ahead of Team Vegan’s, which felt good even though we knew they’d beat us by ~30s. A messy final 7 minutes, but well-fought max effort from everyone. Once all the teams had finished we learned we had finished a disappointing 10th place (out of 21), 1:14 behind first place. 3 seconds faster and we would have been in 8th place.
See my activity on Zwift >
See my ride on Strava >
Watch My Race Recording:
The Aftermath
Soon after saving my race on Zwift and Strava, I got messages from Team Vegan riders apologizing for the messy pass. I got an email from one of their team members (Sean Leary) as well – so three different messages from three different riders!
All of the messages were similar in tone – apologizing that things got a bit messy. And I say kudos to Team Vegan for reaching out and acknowledging that they could have done things better. That’s good sportsmanship.
I had a nice email chat with Sean, who sent over his more detailed thoughts on what happened (at my request). I wanted to give Team Vegan a chance to share what happened from their perspective, so this wasn’t a one-sided post and we could all learn from it. (Note: Sean wanted to make sure I mention that what he wrote is just his view, and not an official team statement. “I don’t speak for others, and I certainly don’t speak for all vegans!” Ha!) Here’s what Sean wrote:
I watched your video of the race – an impressive push at the end! 190 BPM is no joke.
So I reviewed your video and our stream as well, and I think that gives me a reasonable view of the exchange, although I’ll concede I’m biased toward my own point of view, of course.
We definitely made some mistakes and can learn from this.
Here’s my take based on what I saw from the videos, and being in the thick of it:
We rushed it
We didn’t gather ourselves properly before attempting the pass, and we didn’t give your team a proper heads up. In fact, we were in the process of completing a lead change just before we made contact with your team. We should have sorted ourselves better first, coordinated the pass with you, and then pushed cleanly by. So that’s something we can do better.
We passed at the wrong time
We’re a light team, and we came past you at the bottom of a hill at full speed. Not smart. That definitely played in the perception of how fast each team was ‘pushing’ in relation to eachother. You were gliding easily into us with a huge momentum advantage that we simply did not have at the bottom of the hill.
We got jumbled up
The result of us executing the pass in haste caused us to open a gap between our four riders (two and two) just after we got clear of you. So we struggled to pull ourselves back together. We did our best to get together and push hard as quickly as possible, but I can see from your video it seemed slow and I understand the frustration. I would have felt the same way.
(Note: At the 32:15 mark someone suggests we were waiting for a dropped rider. Just so you know, that’s not the case. We were doing everything we could to just pull the four of us together and get clear from your team as quickly as possible. I didn’t even know we lost someone until down the road.)
In fairness, I nitpicked a couple of things from your video that may have contributed to the situation, and perhaps some interesting dynamics and perception points:
You slowed for us early, but powered up as we came through
Your team slowed well before we got to you on the downhill, a full 20 seconds (31:12-31:32 on your video). The intention was perfect of course, it just took us a bit longer to actually get there (we’re much lighter and only four versus your heavier six). But just before we reached you came the voice command “keep going guys, just keep doing our thing” and you all picked up the wattage. So unfortunately when we did overtake you seconds later, it was harder to push through. It’s still on us for the poor timing and lack of communication – but perhaps a questionable decision to return to business (wattage) as usual with us right on you and in the process of overtaking, especially downhill.
Looks like you jumped up and stayed there after we passed
If you look at the 31:53 mark, we’re just barely clear of you. Granted we’re not super fast here (also momentum differences still playing a role), but a rider jumps up doing 5.5w/kg and pulls you and your team right to the back of us as we’re trying to get away. So in my view that’s now a reset point – your team has clearly pushed watts (even accidentally) and slid right up into us, so it’s now on you to ease back and allow us to fully get clear again, and fade back out of our draft. I’m not sure we ever really get that opportunity.
Instead what follows are a series of comments about us “taking our time”, etc. But in fact at that moment our leader is pushing 5.6w/kg and our team is all doing 4-5w/kg. More importantly though, your team is doing 45-46kph! If you scan back through your video, your team rarely does more than 44kph even in perfect formation on flats. So at the moment you’re all expressing frustration at how we’re holding you up, you’re actually going faster than you were at any other point in the race (on flats). I feel like that’s simply you drafting us at that point. Going faster, not slower.
I think it just felt slower because you had effectively created a 10-man draft with us (in a pretty nice single-file line I might add) and were pushing much lower wattage back in positions 5-10. Felt slower, but was faster.
So I do feel like the data tells a bit of a different story than the perception you may have had, and reveals that game dynamics played a much bigger part of this than perhaps we both had thought real-time.
I still hold that the biggest issue was that we weren’t very smart about our pass. But upon review, especially of the actual speeds, what followed might be less a case of us being in your way, and more about you in our draft.
I hope that’s a fair take, if not totally over-analyzed. Let me know if you see it differently!
Did the messy pass cost our team valuable seconds? That’s the big question, I suppose. It may not seem like much, but our entanglement with Team Vegan lasted for approximately 2km, and a speed difference of just 2kph (going from 46 to 44kph) for 2 kilometers equates to about 7 seconds of time lost.
But I don’t think we actually lost time beyond what we would normally lose when easing for an overtake. (Note: some of my teammates may disagree). It sure felt like we were losing time, because we had eased our effort while waiting for Team Vegan to get away. But our actual speed (as Sean mentioned) is still 45-46kph on the flat ground. It’s also true that we benefited from a bit of Team Vegan draft, and probably in the end it was all a wash. No hard feelings, as far as I’m concerned. Life’s too short for that!
I think the interesting takeaways for me from this race are:
- When we don’t ride in a strict formation, we don’t perform well. This was our messiest TTT to date, and it shows in our overall time/ranking.
- Each rider’s view of an overtaking/pass is very different. There are a lot of variables at play that make overtaking a challenging proposition in some situations! Today’s situation was one of those, with a lighter 4-man team overtaking a 6-man team on a descent near the end of the race.
Your Thoughts
Ever been a part of a messy overtake? What do you think of the overtake from today’s race? Share your thoughts below!
Hello Eric,
Our TTT tean had similar occurences. At Tmthe beginning of our TTTone rider lost pairing and burned a book of matches rejoining aa we slowed ti wait.
Secondly, two if our riders had what appeared to be internet dropouts. However on my recording the dropout was evident, but my teammate’s recording did not show either and nor did I see his dropout
Another teammate,who had no issues with his trainer during pre TTT warmup nor while in pen, had numerous erratic issues.
And we had a similar situation at end of racecwhere we overcame 3 riders then a 4th with 1k of finish only find they had now mixed in using our draft.
It was a confusing end as my 4 teamates was separated not knowing whether to ease or stay with us two pushing to the finish.
Thinking something was up with Zwift.
Please excuse typos. Next time I will not yse my cell.
Eric,
I like the write up. I am in the same ZRL league with you and ride for BMTR_B1. It’s been fun hearing someone else’s perspective of the same race. The thing I find when being passed or passing in TTT, is the team being passed should stay doing what they are doing until the team passing is right on their wheel and starting to overtake, then the team being passed can take a short time off the power, while the team passing should do a short time increasing the power to get clear and then everyone can get back to doing what they were doing fairly quickly. From reading your write up and looking at the video, it seems like you all eased up a bit to soon. Then you got back on the power a touch too quick and got caught in a sticky draft which just kept things close together. They also could have helped by pushing a bit harder for 30 seconds, but it seems like when they did that they split their 4 riders. Near the end of our TTT we had a team 4-6 seconds back with roughly 3KM to go. We just kept going at our pace and they never caught us.
What I do know for certain is that TTT’s are really freakin’ hard! I set two new FTP’s during the ZRL and they have been in TTT.
Looking forward to the last two races!
Wally
Interesting piece with valuable info newbies can learn from. Have you done analysis on speeds of blobs and paceline? I’m about 4 weeks into TTT and have had bad draw of courses that lead to too much blobbing. Interested in how that compares to the sweet paceline of the orange headbanded pros.😉
Filled out name wrong. Said I was new…
It’s on the Zwift insider site. If front wheel is 100% then wheels 2,3,4 can ride at 77% 68% and 66%. We tried to model our power on this basis this week but couldn’t achieve these savings. We ended up pulling 10-20% more watts than we expected based on these forecast savings
We are so so so so sorry guys, we sent him many massages to drop your group, we talk to him after the TTT and made things clear. It will not happen again.
Martial from Foudre team.
Well dirt didn’t really ease for a smooth pass in my view. If anything it actually looked like they became inspired by the pass (the inner chimp is a strong force). I think you should give way to the stronger team. After all they did start at least 30 seconds behind you… so clearly they are moving faster!!!
Hi Eric,
We sincerely apologize about Guiseppe Zande, unfortunately he didn’t know the golden rules of TTT :(.
He go a wifi drop at beginning and didn’t come back on Discord, so we tried to reach him via FB and companion without luck.
Sorry again for the inconvenience.
Foudre team
Messy overtakes are just par for the course on Zwift. Without brakes etc it’s hard to hold formation and stay organised. The sticky draft doesn’t help.
In our race we were overtaken headed downhill into the tunnels. I stopped pedalling for 5 seconds but got sucked back into the overtaking team that came through us. We then had a similar issue to you, the other team spent so much effort coming through us that they couldn’t open a gap. We messed around for about a minute trying to let them gap us before getting back on the power and finishing about 3 seconds behind, though with a 7km race with them to the finish.
Messy passes happens, and I think we all need to learn to live with it. My biggest gripe is solo riders who decide to try and grab a free wheel from each group that passes them. Might help if Zwift\WTRL could auto-kick anyone who falls 20 seconds off their team.
Loved the write up and graciousness from both sides. I think 80%+ of messy passes are misunderstandings and/or suboptimal execution, rather than flouting the rules.
Would be great if somehow discord team
leaders could be preconnected pre race and when they came together comms kicked in. Sure a ‘we will
push an extra wpkg would be met with we will drop 1 wpkg’ for 10 secs and all this would be solved
Great write up, Eric. (And thanks for including both perspectives.)
I think the main culprit having watched the section of the race a few times was the location of the pass, given the speed and the respective weights and numbers in our teams at the point of the takeover. If it had been anywhere else on the course I don’t think it would have been so messy. Lessons to be learned, for sure.
One potential solution to these kinds of messy takeovers would be a pair of buttons on the companion app to let you override the auto positioning and pick a lane on the road (if they won’t let us use the sterzo in ttt). Overtaking team goes on one side, being overtaken on the other.
Sorry we weren’t very responsive during the takeover, I think we were all pushing so hard to try to get clear that the companion app’s tiny keyboard was very far from our collective minds!
Cheers to you and the team for all staying cool and congrats for the huge push for the line at the end.
See you in Harrogate on Tuesday! 😊
I agree that the location (one of the longest descents on the route) was the main culprit! If the pass had happened on a climb I think it would have been much cleaner. But you can’t exactly sit behind another team and wait for a good spot to pass, can you?
See ya in Yorkshire!
If Zwift is going to add features for TTT, like the mentioned lane separation feature, it makes more sense to just glue teams together so that the game physics lend a draft only to registered members of the same team. Other teams and lone riders would get no draft from any other team, because the game would prevent it. With such a game feature added, the only problem on passing would be confusion as teams jumbled together, but there’s no avoiding that. No one would need to be concerned about lone riders joining their team because those lone riders would get no draft, and the team would gain no benefit from the lone rider added to their group. Lone riders would quickly get dropped.
And passes like the lighter Vegan team passing through the heavier Dirt team would happen naturally, on the following hill, without a lot of need for either team to do much to accommodate the other.
Great idea!
I think that’s what Zwift addressed by removing draft effect from TT bikes. They attached the no draft characteristic to the bike to make it easier to manage in game. However TTT cannot use the no draft bikes and therefore zwift would have to enable the glue feature for specific teams. Seems like it would be quite complex to implement as an add-on given all the variables they need to cover. But yes, that would solve everything and mean passing teams is a non-issue. They would be invisible to each other from a draft point of view.
Great sportsmanship writeup Eric. I love perspective and how we conversate can help see the other view. Seems game dynamics played a large role. Let’s be honest too in saying when you’re going full gas in a tt it’s difficult to also be super conscious of trying to pass or being passed. Both parties tried and that’s important. Ride on!
we had some similar issues, one teammate starting about 10 seconds back and having to catch up, then a back and forth situation with another team. seems everything could be sorted out if zwift would just program this type of event differently. they have already created a TT race protocol, with no drafting and individualized start times. they just need to do a team TT protocol where teams get a set start time, and can draft off eachother, but not other teams. then botched starts and passing wouldn’t be an issue. it’s another case of something that should be easy for zwift to fix, but instead they make the community come up with these cumbersome workarounds. same for zwiftpower, zwift duathlon etc….
Great write up. That sprint to the finish does feel like 400km at the end of a TTT! 😃
Ha! Oops. Fixed.
I love racing but I’ve never wanted to try a TTT mainly because of the logistics, but reading this has reinforced my thinking of definitely not wanting to try one in the future.
Pete, this is a good write up of how things can occur from time to time, but i can assure you this is not what you would experience in every event. Sure there are a few race incidents but mostly it’s a lone rider who tags along briefly. I would strongly urge you to give a TTT a go – you will push yourself harder than you think you can – you will hate it and curse that you signed up for the whole 40min, then while slumped over the bars you’ll revel in the experience and start the process of analysing the data, replaying where you and the team could have been better and begin the team disord convo on lessons learned….then move focus to the next weeks course! Give it a crack – just once and see 🙂
I second what J says. TTT is tough, things like this occur and you get disruption, but as long as everyone stays cool and remembers this is community sport, has a laugh and learns from it it’s really no big deal. Plus when you get the rotations right and your team is working well together it’s such a great event, really very rewarding 🙂
It’s the best racing format on Zwift IMO. The teamwork aspect makes it much more rewarding than other formats.
I would think steering would help here for a lot of issues. You could pass out of draft like a regular race and hold formation better.
I think steering in a TTT would be super cool! It would let you actually control your position in the group, would be be nice.
We won ours again! Two from two. EMEA W1 B2. Apparently we are TTT specialists of a sort – best placed rider in a race 5th but have won two TTTs.
Really enjoying the TTT format, I’d only done one WTRL TTT before this. We didn’t do very well to begin with, but we have got steadily better, getting the hang of comms and pacelines etc.. I notice we are doing much longer turns than you though, 90s is our normal turn length. Interesting to see if it would make much difference if we reduced the turn length (although what we are doing seems to be working for us).
Looking at the splits we must have done a mega negative split compared to other teams, we were only 4th fastest at the first split.
Still always nervous about making passes. We caught 3 teams this week which was quite stressful – we lost a rider at the first pass. Plus there’s always the doubt that we will be going fast enough afterwards to make the pass stick, or if I’m going to blow up doing it.
I’d look at Strava fly-by and see how the gap to other teams was affected. That is, if members of other teams have opted into flyby, now that the default is to opt out.