Van Rysel RCR Connected Home Trainer with Zwift Cog and Click

The Van Rysel RCR Connected Home Trainer with Zwift Cog and Click is Decathlon’s own-brand flagship smart trainer. If you’re a rider that wants a bit of fun indoors it’s worth looking at, but if you want accurate data and quality training, you’re better off elsewhere – especially as this isn’t massively cheaper than the competition.

At £749.99, this package sits above Van Rysel’s D100 and D500 models, which are £279.99 and £399.99 respectively. They both come with Cog and Click too.

In the RCR’s box you get the trainer itself, a host of axle adaptors for compatibility with pretty much any bike, the Zwift Click shifter buttons, the Zwift Cog (pre-installed) and a card with a two-month membership code. The packaging has some handy diagrams to help measure your bike’s axles, and thus pair it with the correct adaptors, which is a nice touch.

One of the main draws here is this Zwift bundle: the hardware costs £49.99 on its own, and the two month subscription another £35.98. One minor issue is that the code is only valid for new members; I had a Zwift account a few years ago, so couldn’t redeem the code without setting up a new account with a new email. A small problem, but a little bit annoying.

The Clicks mount to the handlebars with two rubberised straps each. Grippers underneath stop them sliding around and scuffing anything, but annoyingly the grippers aren’t actually attached and are quite easy to lose. The buttons are tactile and have a nice, positive feel.

The 14T Cog has a dial that adjusts over ten positions for tuning the chainline, and Zwift claims it’s compatible with most things – the new Campagnolo N3W 13-speed and 1/8″ fixed-gear/single-speed chains not included.

Once I’d found a gear that worked with my chainline, the Cog felt fine. It’s pretty quiet, and feels much the same a trainer with a regular cassette. The digital shifting takes a bit of getting used to, however, and having 24 sequential gears means that you can be left holding a button for a little while if you’re trying to manually do intervals with two polarised gears.

Each shift gives a little bump through the pedals to try to emulate real world shifting, but it doesn’t have the same weight to it, and at first I actually thought it was an issue rather than a feature. Obviously in ERG mode you don’t really need to use the virtual shifting anyway, but personally I prefer real shifters and a regular cassette on a trainer. Its nice being able to give ‘ride ons’ to other Zwift users via a button, and control the menu with the clicks instead of reaching for your laptop, but I think I’d prioritise a more authentic interface with the bike.

Real deal wheel feel?

The ride feel is pretty good. This thing has a hefty stainless steel construction, and feels very solid when you’re cranking out sprints and intense efforts. The flywheel is weighty, and the trainer is rated up to 2,800 Watts.

For the first few rides, I got the impression something wasn’t quite right. Eventually I cross-referenced the power meter against my own Stages Gen 3 crank arm, my Favero Assioma pedals, and my partner’s Wahoo Speedplay Power pedals. All three confirmed the RCR’s power meter was reading anywhere from 5 to 10% high, increasing as the intensity of the effort increased. All three external meters read within a handful of Watts of each other.

Decathlon claims no calibration is required, and there’s no way to do it. Because of this, I decided to continue testing with Zwift paired to my Favero pedals rather than the trainer, and found the power readings much closer to perceived exertion.

It’s a bit baffling to me as to why they don’t allow calibration. Perhaps it’s the sort of thing that can be added with a firmware update.

Ztuck with Zwift

So! On to my next gripe. Whilst Zwift is fine, I wanted to try the trainer on other software such as TrainingPeaks Virtual, TrainerRoad, or the internal workouts of the Wahoo head-units. But for some reason, none of these programs could detect the RCR. I turned everything off, unplugged it all and plugged it all back in, but I just could not get the trainer to pick up on anything other than Zwift. Okay, it’s the biggest virtual training platform out there, but if – like me – you’re not a massive fan, it’s a meaningful negative.

For me, ERG mode is where Zwift reveals its biggest flaw; the resistance builds a few seconds before the interval actually starts.

For low intensity, steady-state intervals (anything up to about threshold intensity) this wasn’t too much of an issue; the resistance would ramp up over a few seconds, the interval would start, and I’d settle into the effort. The power on screen would fluctuate a fair bit both up and down, which is disconcerting, but the average power across any given interval would be close enough not to worry.

However, for more intense intervals that require a big power spike to get on top of the Watts, it proved a pretty much fatal flaw.

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For example, I was trying to do a few sets of pretty standard 30/30 intervals: 30 seconds somewhere around zone five/VO2 max, and 30 seconds to recover, ten times in a row. But two or three seconds before each interval resistance starts ramping up and, if you don’t start the effort early, the ERG mode increases resistance further and the death spiral begins, quickly grinding me to a complete halt. I thought this was a one off, so disconnected everything and tried again, only to have the same issue. It actually ended up wrecking a few sessions before I gave up using ERG mode and relied on the virtual shifting alone – which, given the wide swings in gear ratio required, was still quite annoying.

Not everyone will use this for dedicated intervals, but ERG mode performance was a real low point for me.

Value

The £749.99 asking price feels reasonable for what you’re getting here, but it’s not as far below the name-brand offerings as you often see with Decathlon stuff.
For example, the Wahoo Kickr V6 Turbo Trainer with Zwift Cog and Click is £150 more at £899.99, and the Kickr Core 2 with Zwift Cog and Click is just £499.99.

Looking at Garmin’s Tacx lineup, the Neo 2T Smart Turbo comes in at £859.99, and the mid-level Flux 2 is just £629.99.

Overall

Whilst the RCR trainer itself is okay – if not without its flaws – and the Zwift element boosts the value enough to largely justify the price, if you’re after focused, accurate training tools then this isn’t the choice for you, especially as the power meter gets more inaccurate the harder you ride and can’t be calibrated. For more casual training via Zwift (and nothing else), however, it’s a reasonable option.