Zwift Racing League

Seven teams entered and rode in this season’s Zwift Racing League (ZRL; 8 week season, starting Tuesday 11 January), with riders across all experiences and abilities. ZRL uses Zwift’s category system which allocates watts/kg, ranking from the lowest category (D) through C, B and A to A+ (although A+ riders are grouped in the same leagues as A riders). Sotonia has:

  • One women’s D team: Sotonia Derailleurs
  • Two women’s C teams: Sotonia Cadence & Sotonia Cranks
  • One women’s B team: Sotonia Bullets
  • Two men’s B teams: Sotonia Bees & Sotonia Blaze
  • One men’s A team: SotoniAs

Special thanks are due to the team captains. There’s a lot of last minute chasing and problem solving involved in this, so we want to particularly thank:
Hannah Griffiths for Bullets, Amy Thorpe for Cadence, Vikki Sutcliffe for Cranks, Sarah Austin for Derailleurs, Tim Cooke for SotoniAs, Russell Speight for Bees and Alastair Cooper for Blaze.

In total, we had 57 riders representing Sotonia across the season (a reasonable proportion of the Sotonia women’s riders were temporary honorary Sotonians, but originally from Venta). Standout rider for the season was Will Weynberg, but there were some committed performances across all the teams. SotoniAs were the highest performing team across the season, finishing second and earning automatic promotion to the highest possible community league across their global time zone.

League positions are shown in the table below. The next season starts in April, but it seems very likely that we will have fewer teams entered, due to riders choosing to ride outside across the summer months.

 

Interclub Zwift team time trial

We hosted our first ever interclub event on Zwift on Tuesday 8 March. This was a team time trial handicap race between Sotonia and VC Venta, using the Clubs facility on Zwift (we have a Sotonia CC club set up). 10 teams entered: five Sotonia teams (of which one was a single rider, and one was a women’s team), and five Venta teams (of which one was a women’s teams). The handicap system worked relatively well, but not perfectly and we discovered that Zwift time was different from real internet time, when there was some discrepancy over people’s start times. Nevertheless, type II fun was had by all, and we’ve agreed that we’ll do something similar again towards the end of the summer. Results as follows: