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Zwift’s “ZRacing” is the platform’s most popular ongoing race series, and in December, riders will take on 5 standout routes released in 2025.
Read about this month’s races below, along with details on the bonus XP now on offer!
December’s Routes
Here are the routes we’ll be racing in December:
- Stage 1 (Dec 1-7): Prospect Park Loop
- 4 laps (21.90km, 149m)
- Powerups: Draft, Aero
- Stage 2 (Dec 8-14): Scotland Smash
- 1 lap (18.0km, 167m elevation)
- Powerups: Feather, Aero
- Stage 3 (Dec 15-21): Hell of the North
- 1 lap (20.1km, 241m)
- Powerups: Feather, Draft
- Stage 4 (Dec 22-28): London Uprising
- 1 lap (20.8km, 357m)
- Powerups: Feather, Anvil
- Stage 5 (Dec 29-Jan 4): Gentil 8
- 1 lap (23.7km, 248m)
- Powerups: Feather, Draft
See upcoming Range 1 events >
See upcoming Range 2 events >
See upcoming Advanced events >
See ALL upcoming events >
New XP Bonuses
Zwift has just replaced the achievement badges you could formerly earn for completing every race in a ZRacing series with XP bonuses. You will now earn a 1000 XP bonus for completing stage 1, then additional bonuses for each stage thereafter.
Zwift says you will “earn up to 1500 XP in a four-week series or 2000 XP in a five-week series.”
GC Leaderboards
Zwift’s web-based leaderboards are used for tracking the monthly GC competition for the ZRacing series. Unlike past years, no ZwiftPower registration or use is necessary.
Access the ZRacing leaderboards at zwift.com/racing/zracing >
Your GC ranking is based on your best finishing time for each stage, and you can race each stage more than once to try for a better time.
Category Options
Zwift schedules three different flavors of ZRacing events in order to encourage “Fairer, more competitive racing for everyone.” They each use different racing score ranges for categorization and are titled Advanced, Range 1, and Range 2. Click banners below to see upcoming events for each:
Questions or Comments?
Post below!
Bring back the badges!!
I agree! I like the badges to track yearly accomplishments. I wonder if they could add badges that tally rides per year, race series per year, bike stage ups per year and then give badges for completing special events like Zwift academy, Tour du Zwift ….
No more mission badges then?
Wish they’d stop plugging NYC. It’s the worst!
So nice to see them using one of the routes from this week again next week! Just what everyone wants!
Agree that 4x Prospect park loop just days before another 4x Prospect park loop sound a bit like a coordination slip. With the race director on T-day holiday it might just stay that way. …but if we can handle 20+ laps of the Volcano I am sure we can manage 8x PPL too #staypositive =)
Zwift how about givings us Drops as well as bonus XP to help with Upgrades ?
No badge – no party
I wish Zwift would bring the badges back
Badges for the win. I have no use for XP since I am at level 100. No point at all to race now when I dont really like the route.
I agree also at level 100 , and when u level up after 100 you get 50,000 drops , which I can earn by riding Road to Sky . Leveling up after 100 is like riding 600 more miles for 50,000 drops , make it 100,000 drops .
What’s the point of XP points? Unless more levels are created? Give me Drops and Badges back
No doubt I’ll get downvoted for this. What’s the point of badges? I never understood them. Drops would be cool. I’m not at 100 so xp is nice too.
Fresh? More like Rapidly Going Stale, we want course variety, not the same routes time and time again for ZwifthHQ races!
Give us custom length longer routes, or make stronger pens do more laps, change the GC to points for finish position and just accept there might be a number of racers that share the GC win etc.
I guess only Level 100 riders read these articles and comment 😂
Desmotivador, XP, para aquellos que tenemos nivel 100.
Bring back the badges!
How hard would it be to make everyone happy?? lol, not very is the answer.. Give people what they want, a badge, XP bonus and Drops for completing the series.. it’s not rocket science and doesn’t cost you anything! :-p
Removing badges is a bizarre, it’s pretty well known that they’re a good motivator, evidenced across so many apps in sports and beyond – Strava, Duolingo, add your own below..
And why not do both?!
And I’m a long way from lvl 100 and fully appreciate the xp (and leveling up gives you a drops boost every time too)
..yeah…just uninstalled Zwift, removed zwiftinsider from bookmarks (and blocked it in hosts file !!!) —- and went to Dollar-store to buy some real golden chocolate badges…
I’m new here on ZRacing, and I see many ppl complaining about badges. What were they providing? Just the completion without any additional benefit? I’m lvl 53 so XP is good, to level up faster. Also drops would be appreciated more than XP since you can use them to upgrade bikes while XPs are pretty much useless.
And I understand they beat the NY routes as they were just released, but I hope they stop in 2026. NYC is the worst world out there.
Eric, do you have any intel as to why they dropped the idea of badges? A lot of people, myself included, seem to really like them. Seems like an odd choice on their part.
Zwift says they’ve found XP is “more valuable to the majority of racers.”
Fair enough, i dont recall any survey or lots of comments in zwift forums about this so sounds more like zwift hq deciding based on what they want and not the masses.
Aside from that, in the past there was both for many events, like releases of new routes, no? Wouldn’t be that hard to just have both after you finish.
In the words of a classic advertising campaign: Why can’t we have both?
A 1000xp for stage 1 or a 1000xp for the first stage you do? Are stages 1 & 2 worth more xp than stages 4 & 5 if those are the only two stages you do?
I’ve been off Zwift for a while and just returned for a 2 month period to get through the dark evenings. Great to see many developments have taken place. XP seems to have been totally devalued though, with so many bonuses and streak benefits etc. On the other hand, the bike upgrade paths seem substantial in effort and benefit. Anyhow, my question is if series like these monthly series neutralize bike stats for all participants? It feels a bit of a show stopper to be left with such a performance penalty during a race (I don’t care about a disadvantage in free rides). PS with my riding it would probably take a few years to get a bike upgraded, so I won’t really bother with that. But depending on how races feel I will decide if I include them in my riding. Apparently I first had to do a ride to be allowed to join a race, which was a surprise tbf, but at least I have that covered now.
Bike upgrades are NOT neutralized for ZRacing events. They are neutralized in some community events, but Zwift generally doesn’t neutralize. So upgrades matter!
If you don’t do a ride before doing a race, Zwift have no idea how strong you are and what level of race you should enter. Doing that one ride at least gives them a starting point though it’s unlikely that many people will do a hard effort to properly show how strong they are.
4/5 of these routes end with a climb at or just before the finish.
The great thing about the ZwiftPower series results page is that you can sort by age group. For Oldies like me (72) it was motivating to see how you compare to similar aged riders. This wasn’t available in the Zwift Web based pages.
Why not just keep the badges and include XP as well?
I see 0 races the next few days on Zwift. Is the system down? Edit : maybe it’s the companion app.
I’m seeing lots. Maybe reset your filters in Companion?
Not much ascensive if you’re already at level 100. What would more XP do for me. Badges are better.
I don’t understand the Range 1 and Range 2 categories and how it’s an improvement over Cat A, B, C, D. Can you provide more info?
https://zwiftinsider.com/zracing/
1 size does not fit all. Some are new here , some like myself level 100, but only 2yrs on Zwift and remember how it was 2yrs ago . Give drops , XP and badges , all three mean something . Plus on Zwift power , make a 70+ age division . WELCOME NEW RIDERS
I like their duel racing score range approach. I’m ~525, so I straddle two groups. I’d rather be at the top end of the range than the bottom 🙂
“Leading the charge” up a climb is way better than being dropped. I’m also bouncing between two categories.
Eric, thanks for the great work sir….do you know: bill halliwellare there makeup rides for any events we may miss along the way?
No, there are never make up events for ZRacing races.
Is there a GC for this series of racing? I’ve done the first 4 and logged on to find out how I was doing in the overall ranking but can’t find it! I can see the rankings for all the individual stages. Is there a different web link I need?
Yes, GC for ZRacing is at https://www.zwift.com/racing/zracing
Yeah, I’m looking at that but for some reason in the December series, the “Rank” (i.e. your overall position in the GC) has been replaced with a green bar chart and a table of best power scores. Hence, I can’t see a way to click through to the GC results table as I would like to.
Anyone know if there will be opportunities to catch up on missed stages? Was really unwell during week three and didn’t have it in me to ride the route solo.
See Eric’s reply from 16th – no make-up events 🙁
(I missed first week)
I came here to see what I got for completing this. XP? I have been here since 2016 … I don’t care about XP as an incentive .