Review: Zwiftpower
(2020) Say you’ve been riding around Watopia for months and the Epic is getting bland. Maybe the new French boards didn’t jazz up the indoor scene as anticipated. A quick entry into the furious Crit City board has eyebrows twitching, but some rider won the C race with a 8 w/kg motor. Surely there must be some response from Zwift. Well there is. Or isn’t. It depends on whom you ask.
In an effort to battle Zwift’s competitive e-racing scene, an add-on emerged a few years ago to provide extensive data about a rider, a race, or even a team. A racer may have finished seventh, but the victory winds up going to her. How did that happen? Zwiftpower is the answer, and for the numbers person, it’s an indoor rabbit hole.
Zwiftpower is a controller that keeps the racing scene real. The C race at Crit City advertises participants must hold a 2.5 - 3.1 w/kg effort. Anything under 2.5 w/kg is not a concern; it’s the sandbagger capable of 4.0 w/kg. Anyone putting out numbers higher than 3.2 w/kg (there is a bit of wiggle room) is disqualified on Zwift power. As in, race points aren’t even awarded. That leader who soloed off the front? She did all that for nothing as she red-lined into the DQ tent. This is how finishing seventh could net a win.
While the results are attractive, the numbers machine is impressive. Log in, find the race just finished, and behold the power of opted-in information. The standard measurements are here: fifteen second, thirty second, one minute, five minute, and twenty-minute power. There’s the normalized power (NP) band snuggled in all that information. Race time, average wattage, maximum heart rate, average heart rate are all splashed across the Zwift power dashboard. Click on the easy-to-miss Critical Power icon and study the sinking power curve from the event. We are only getting started at geeking out.
If it feels like some guy named Chester is constantly in your races, you might see him under another section of Zwiftpower. In a box is a collection of nemeses, victims, and common opponents. We have not formed a team, but messing around with the feature for all of five minutes made it clear it was easy. The common opponents list might reveal how often you have competed against Chester. Hopefully he is a victim, a person you beat regularly, and not a nemesis. Somehow one of our riding buddies, Eric, has relegated us to the victim column twice and it does not sit well.
Zwiftpower could be the information behind the feedback when signing up for a race. A few times we noticed the participant list shuffled into three columns. There is a favorite. There are the potential winners. And there are the unlikely winners. Happily we showed up twice as the favorite. Unhappily we did not deliver at the line. We did, however, finish fifth only to log in to Zwiftpower and see the victory icon next to our name. The leaders overcooked their watts-per-kilogram, handing me the top step on the podium.
Signing up for Zwiftpower is free, though it is a bit of a hurdle. Expect to have devices laid out to solve the riddle of registration. Riders are expected to opt-in from Zwift, locate their profile by figuring out their Zwift identification number (this was aggravating at best), follow the prompts to add a four digit number to the end of their name, wait for Zwiftpower to recognize the four-digit keychain, then reenter the profile and delete the numbers from our profile. Once the profile is active, expect to see past events populate the dashboard over time. Don’t expect to see events such as Gran Fondos. Zwiftpower only responds to events marked ‘race.’
Add-ons such as Zwiftpower are rooted items in the virtual reality cycling world. Other platforms should take notice of the culture of the application. Racers are not looking for an advantage, they are simply looking for a chance. Zwiftpower theoretically normalizes the playing field through an onslaught of information. Even if we finish sixth in Crit City’s results, we wait until it’s official on Zwiftpower. And if we don’t win, it's definite we sit at the computer analyzing the ridiculous amounts of data to see where the race got away. Either outcome works for us.
