The first race of round 2 of the Zwift Racing League happened on Tuesday, November 4th on the largely flat course of Greatest London Flat.
This round saw 9.5k racers compete across 216 separate divisions from every corner of the globe – in and of itself a massive coordination effort. Big thanks to the WTRL team for pulling this off season after season.
Given that this was a TTT where the times can be compared across zones, and now that all the results are in, I thought it would be worth taking a step back and looking at the ZRL landscape as a whole. Where are the teams concentrated? Which zones are more competitive? Who are the best of the best?
To answer this, I looked at the top team finishing time in each division across all 88 ZRL round 2 events that occurred last Tuesday. In the chart below, each bubble represents a division, plotted by the time of the fastest team in that division (lower on the chart is faster), with the size of the bubble corresponding to the total number of riders competing in that division:
Source: ZwiftPower, time based on 4th rider to finish event
Interestingly:
- Clearly some zones are significantly more populated than others, with the Shamrock Open B Regular category having 6 distinct divisions while other zones have just a single division
- While the overall riders are relatively concentrated in the Shamrock through Indigo zones, the fastest open times largely came from less-populated zones
- This was not the case for the women’s field, where the Mint zone is both the most populated and also fielded the fastest times
- There should be some re-shuffling of teams within divisions, with 3 out of the 8 fastest times coming from a team outside of division 1 in their zone. (Editor’s note: WTRL did some reshuffling after the race.)
The last topic to look at was teams that performed particularly well across zones and categories. While the underlying data is approximate at best, there are clearly a few organizations fielding top teams across multiple zones and categories:
Source: Team of the 4th-place rider in each event as defined by their ZwiftPower profile
- DIRT continues to be by far the largest racing organization within Zwift, though the actual teams are organized by the many sub-teams within DIRT
- Aeonian Racing Team appears to have fielded an impressive number of winning teams in the women’s leagues
- Followed by some of the more popular event organizers on Zwift fielding 5 or more winning ZRL teams (Coalition, Rhino, SISU, OTR, and eSRT)
Overall, ZRL continues to be an impressive collection of racing teams coming together season after season, round after round. I would highly encourage anyone who has not given it a try to give it a go (many teams are always recruiting and quite welcoming).
For the ~10,000 of you racing this round all around the world, best of luck out there!
Questions or Comments?
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Awesome to see these numbers racing. Congratulation to everyone doing it!
Imagine how many more riders there might be if there wasn’t a gap of 7.5 hours for the US West Coast from 0230 to 1000 AM? I suppose that gap rolls through the rest of the world but speaking for myself and most of my “friends”, that gap leaves us out. I’m available to race from 0500 to 0800 or so. I’m vaguely aware of the WTRL events because of Zwiftinsider.com and the Zwift forum. None of my calendar apps have any of their races because the start times are so far out of my sphere as to not show up.
I’ve taken to calling this Start Time Racism. WTRL is aware of this issue and chooses to ignore it. Consider: There’s this 7.5 hour gap and it’s followed by something like ten races over the next four hours. I don’t remember the exact number but for the US WC, from 1100 to 1300 there are races every 15 MINUTES!
For what’s supposed to be Zwift’s Premier event this defies comprehension. Just another thing to shout into the wind about.