Virtual racing revamped, more hardware and more roads: here are 6 things you need to know about Zwift as it turns 10

The leaves are falling, and the shed/garage/spare room is calling: now the nights are drawing back in, many peoples’ thoughts are inevitably turning to indoor training, and keeping that summer fitness all the way through to jersey weather again next year. 

Zwift has been a big player in the indoor training space for a long time. This year it turns ten: unbelievably it’s a whole actual decade since we were racing against the blue ghosts on Jarvis Island. These days it’s common to see tens of thousands of other riders online, and the stats are huge: In the decade it’s been online, riders on Zwift have logged a total of 8.72 billion kilometres, and over 81 billion metres of climbing. 

> Best indoor cycling apps

The “this season on Zwift” article has become a bit of an institution, and it’s always a case of the familiar and the different: some stuff stays the same, some things change, not always the things you wanted to. If you’re new to the platform it can be a bit overwhelming at first: check out our How to get started on Zwift feature for the basics. For the 2024/25 winter season, we’ve picked out six things that you need to know whether you’re a noob or an old hand. 

1. Hardware to the front and centre

We saw earlier in the year with the introduction of the Zwift Ride that after the Tron Bike no-show and the short-lived Hub trainer, Zwift is getting much more serious about hardware, and making the process of getting set up on Zwift as simple as possible. The Zwift Ride is a combination of a dedicated frame and a Wahoo KICKR Core smart trainer, fitted with a single-ratio Zwift Cog instead of a cassette; we’ve been (grumpily) putting some miles into it in a hot shed over a hot summer and our review will be out soon.

View now: Zwift Ride at Zwift for £1,199.99

> Best turbo trainers

The Zwift Cog swaps your rear cassette for just one cog; it’s compatible with pretty much any road bike, with any number of gears, and does away with the need to buy a cassette or swap it from your wheel onto your trainer. Shifting is handled electronically and you can control the game with a wealth or bar-mounted controls, similar to the Zwift Play controllers

View now: Zwift Cog at Zwift for £79.99

The KICKR Core Zwift One is available on its own, too. The new V2 cog gets adjustable gear indexing so you can tweak chain line for an even quieter ride without touching your bike’s gears. Oh, and it’s orange.

View now: KICKR Core Zwift One from Zwift for £449.99

Zwift Ready: app-specific trainer range expands 

This Autumn sees a big expansion of hardware called Zwift Ready, that’s designed to make it simple to get on Zwift and get the best experience on a bigger range of hardware. There are more trainers shipping with the Zwift Cog and including a Zwift Click button to enable virtual shifting. 

The Wahoo KICKR Core continues to be available, of course, and the KICKR V6 and KICKR Move can now also be bought pre-set-up ready for virtual shifting in Zwift. The JetBlack Victory is also available now in a Zwift One build. If you already have any of these trainers, or a Zwift Hub, then it’s now possible to upgrade to virtual shifting with the redesigned Zwift Cog, which is compatible with them all.

Later in the year the Elite Direto XR and Van Rysel D100 trainers will be added to the Zwift Ready stable. The Zwift Cog does make setup on Zwift very simple and reduces transmission wear, although you do need to factor in the downsides: the shifting isn’t as good as a well-set-up mechanical system, and you’re tied into Zwift as the hardware doesn’t allow shifting in other apps.

On top of that you can also buy the Zwift Ride frame separately now, so if you have a Zwift-Ready-compatible trainer you can upgrade your setup to a dedicated smart bike. It’s effectively the same as the frame packaged with the KICKR Core trainer, but you do get an adjustable front foot to tweak the position for different trainers.

View now: Zwift Ride Smart Frame from Zwift for £749.99

> “I’ll see you in the winter”: Zwift monthly subscription rises  to £17.99 – but company says price hike “necessary” 

2. The head-up-display gets an update

When you’re riding or racing in Zwift you get plenty of information through the HUD, but after lots of requests from the Zwift community there are some fairly major updates this season. You’ll be able to configure the display fields (picking four from seven available) so you’re getting the metrics that you want. Another change is to gradient information; that tiny and mostly useless profile on the map stays, but the new Zwift HUD will also show you dynamic gradient information for the next kilometre or so, to help you judge your attack on that final climb in the race. Or just survive to the top.

The look and feel of the HUD has been updated too, with a new dark transparent theme, and there’s also a handy bar to show you how much time you’ve spent in each of your power zones during a ride.

3. New challenges added 

Zwift has for a long time had three long-term challenges – Climb Mount Everest, Ride California and Tour Italy – that unlock various frames, including that sought-after Tron bike. For this season Zwift is adding some smaller challenges, which you can do alongside the bigger ones. The Cardio Crusher challenge is aimed at “time-crunched riders looking to maximise their fitness gains”, and you’ll need to complete five new short workouts (all under an hour) to complete it. There’s an 250XP boost up for grabs at the end. And, hopefully, a fitness one too.

Route Chaser: The Grade is the other challenge, and you’ll need to complete five routes to finish that one. Three of them are new, including Power to the Tower with nearly 1,500m of climbing packed into less than 45km, which sounds like a pretty attritional bit of shed time.

4. Zwift racing is changing with the new Racing Score

People have been racing on Zwift ever since the community was organising its own events on the original Jarvis Island map a decade ago. And this year sees some quite significant changes to the way that races are categorised. Out goes the current alphabetic category system, and from October in comes racing score

Racing what now?

Categories have been around for a few years now, and the system is, shall we say, not without its issues. The categories are largely based on your power-to-weight ratio at FTP, and there are some problems with that. Most critically, so long as you’re careful to not overdo it you can sandbag in a lower category than your true category for as long as you like, hoovering up the wins. We’ve all raced against those folks.

Zwift Racing Score is different in that it’s a more results-based system, more akin to outdoor racing. To begin with the app assigns you a number from 0 to 1,000 based on your power metrics in the game, and your bodyweight, a similar process to how your category is currently defined. From there, your score will go up or down depending on how well you do in races. So there’s no more endless sitting in D races in zone 1 and then sprinting for the win at the end: if you keep winning, your Racing Score will increase and you’ll be bumped up to harder races, just like you should be! There are five categories covering everyone from beginners to elite racers.

A full calendar of racing

There will, of course, be plenty of races to get your racing score shooting up. The Zwift Racing League is back, and with over 2,600 teams participating it’s a big old thing these days. For this season there are three rounds, each consisting of six stages, and the routes will include some created by the Zwift community. The first round is just round the corner, with racing starting on 10 September.

zRacing makes up around 40% of all racing on Zwift, continues year round. There are five separate competitions happening over the course of the next six months, including a 7-week-long Community Racing Festival, beginning 7 October, to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the platform. 

The Zwift World Series is Zwift’s flagship series this winter, and there are community-level and elite-level events for each of the five races. And there are open qualifying events too, so if you’re good enough you can win yourself a spot on the startline with the big players. We’re not good enough, sadly. Actually, Aaron might be.

5. There are new roads coming, but you’ll have to wait a bit longer

If you’ve already completed all the routes on Zwift (and you haven’t, have you?) then you might be itching to see some new tarmac. And new roads are coming, but you’ll have to wait until November to ride them. It looks like there’s going to be some kind of slow reveal going on: “Zwifters may notice something unusual appearing from the ocean, just off Watopia’s coast”, says Zwift. “Could they be ancient structures?” It suggests that long-time users might see a similarity to how the volcano used to look when it first appeared on the Watopia map. If you’re planning on riding all the stages of the Tour of Watopia over the winter then Stage 5, from 5 November, will take place on the new roads, so make sure you’re signed up for that one.

6. Bikes get upgradeable, and there will be some sweet new (and old) rides

If you’ve been on Zwift a while then you probably have a big stable of bikes already, and new Zwifters will enjoy the challenge of earning enough drops to get a smarter rig. From the end of the year there are big changes coming to the garage, with bikes upgradeable through a series of five stages, making them lighter, quicker-rolling and more aerodynamic. It looks like you’ll have to ride the frame for a certain amount of time to unlock an upgrade, and then fork out some hard-earned drops to make it happen.

As well as that there is a new stable of Halo bikes which Zwift says will offer “high performance and huge street cred”; Zwift has teased us with Miguel Indurain’s Pinarello Espada (above), and there are more to come. Zwift also says that “Only the most brand-loyal Drop Shop customers will be invited to purchase Halo Bikes”, which might mean you need to jump through some hoops to get them. Or it might just mean they’re fantastically expensive.

That’s our overview of all the new stuff to get your head round. Are you heading back to Zwift? What are you most looking forward to about training indoors this winter? Let us know in the comments below!*

*And don’t say “when it stops”