This Sunday marks the 3rd running of Turbo Ten, the brainchild of Zwift employee James Bailey. Run through his High Performance Racing Towels Club, Turbo Ten sees racers take on the 9 shortest routes on Zwift, with the 10th stage being a short climb up Fox Hill on the ZG25 Climb Champs route.
Routes and Schedule
Like Zwift Insider’s Tiny Races, your final result is decided by your overall performance across all ten stages. For Turbo Ten, the rider with the fastest overall time wins! Race routes are as follows:
The races take place at 2pm UTC (3pm UK/4pm CEST/9am EST) each Sunday with results on ZwiftPower.
Sign up at zwift.com/events/tag/turboten
Additional events may be added later for North American or Australian optimized time slots. James has said that he doesn’t want to do this until the Euro-centric times see more than 200 people taking part to ensure that any additional events do not have sparse fields which would take away the “fun”.
More Details
Riders are all equipped with Big Heads and receive two boost powerups in the pen in each event – which gives you a one-second speed boost of 10km/h – use them wisely, either to catch up with a big group or to make a strategic play!
Categorization is by Compound Score, which is computed by multiplying your best 5-minute power in watts by your best 5-minute power in watts per kilo. (So a 100-kilo rider with best 5-minute power of 300w would have a compound score of 300×3=900.)
The categories are as follows:
- Category A: 1700 and above
- Category B: 1200-1700
- Category C: 900-1200
- Category D: 600-900
- Category E: 0-600
Riders all start together in the same paddock, but you’ll be able to see who you’re competing against as riders will all wear the Zwift Racing Category jerseys.
Riders must use either a smart trainer, smart bikes or power meter as their power source and must have a heart rate monitor paired in order to take part.
Questions or comments?
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This looks absolutely Horrible, I’m in! Except I have to wait until it’s got an Australian friendly timeslot.
The categorisation is an interesting way to get around the issue of such short efforts. It’s a question that has an impossible answer, but this one seems to be a good idea.
The problem with CS categorisation is that it’s biased towards lightweight riders. If they could use ZRS seed it’s be ideal for a series like this.
Shame that zwift can’t natively support the series results, so it relies on the barely supported Zwiftpower that not everyone is signed up for.
I used CS as I wanted to be fairer to women over short distances like these. Feedback totally noted on lack of series integration.
How many jerseys is that in total? 12? 2 orange, 3 polka dots, and 7 green? (I haven’t had coffee yet 🙂
Well that was a blast! After doing the Tinies yesterday, this was a good challenge. Having the big climb on Fox for the last was diabolical! And Queens right before that was almost as bad. The C group was great but we all agreed that the spacing between events was a little too much. We spent over five minutes in the pens waiting for the start and that was little long. Still a great event and I’ll be back!
Did this today, was ridiculously good fun and complete torture at the same time.. thanks James! .. I don’t necessarily agree with the too long in the pens thing.. I think the first ones were too short a gap, didn’t get the finish scoreboard as it was auto switching to the next race to soon, think one or two hadn’t even finished in the D’s, the later races 5 minutes is fine as I had to refill water bottles etc. and my legs were completely toast! Was great.
Did this today, was ridiculously good fun and complete torture at the same time.. thanks James! .. I don’t necessarily agree with the too long in the pens thing.. I think the first ones were too short a gap, didn’t get the finish scoreboard as it was auto switching to the next race too soon, think one or two hadn’t even finished in the D’s, the later races 5 minutes is fine as I had to refill water bottles etc. and my legs were completely toast! Was great.
Hey y’all. I’m just curious about the results for today. They were updated after the 8th race and never updated again. Thanks.
Sorry, I did update them after the last race but the update didn’t take. Updated them when I noticed yesterday morning.
No worries. I think this is the best and hardest event I’ve done on Zwift so far. I don’t love the categories, but I get that you’re just never going to make everyone happy when it comes to that. I’m trying to compete with myself from week to week anyway. I’m at the bottom of B, which is always a tough place to be.
@james Bailey — one suggestion for overall scoring. You might consider doing it based on cumulative finish positions or something like that, rather than time, otherwise you can end up with quirks where someone (let’s say me) beats another rider in nine out of 10 races but places below them in the overall because in one race they get dropped early from a group and lose by enough to outweigh the cumulative time gaps in the other 9 races.
I realize this has other potential biases, so it may not be the right way either, but just something to consider.
Really enjoying this series. A decathlon of cycling with race 10 pure torture. I am very much at the back of the Cat D pack but the consistent races and race order across weeks means I can measure any improvement in time and W/Kg across weeks. Even inspired me to do an excel spreadsheet so the series must be good, Length of gaps between races being right or wrong is a very personal issue and /i do not have much of a problem with them. Just glad Race 10 is not time capped.