Transitions happen, they change the world we live in and can be really exciting ….. we are entering a pivotal moment in VR racing and you should be excited ….. seatbelts on, there will be some turbulence.
Two major events during 2023 have shaped the current situation around online VR Racing. Firstly, MyWhoosh became the UCI’s platform of choice for the World Championships, instead of Zwift, and secondly RGT ceased operating. The ecosystem changed, and nature will take its course in rededining VR racing.
During 2023, along came IndieVelo, which is excellent and is focused on getting competitive racing right. Remember that Zwift is not reliable in this respect because of the way it functions. Ultimately there is the possibility that Zwift could use IndieVelo tech with Zwift skins / graphics / scenery to make itself credible again. We shall see.
Meanwhile, MyWhoosh threw a lot of money at developing itself and took the UCI World Championships away from Zwift. We shall see how well MyWhoosh fares but at the current time it is not quite the finished article and has to get itself up to standard fairly rapidly.
MyWhoosh is, arguably, a free version of Zwift with its make believe worlds and graphics. It needs to get it’s functionality up to a higher standard to truly be Zwift’s peer, but it is totally free and probably worth tolerating the imperfections given the price differential.
We are big fans of IndieVelo, it is intuitive and functions exceptionally well. But it has a limited amount of courses and races offer the same limited options over and over. The scenery looks OK, but there’s very little novelty in it, not a problem when racing, but doesn’t lend itself to solo workouts we’d suggest.
Other bidders are around, Rolla is in its infancy and we’ll keep an eye on it.
We, at West London Cycling, find ourselves at a bit of a ‘crossroads’ insofar as we compete in OTR’s TTTs which are now moving from IndieVelo to MyWhoosh. It is our intention to follow and embrace MyWhoosh for TTTs. It should be noted that MyWhoosh embraces steering which is a real plus in TTT racing..
We also have a second, very difficult, decision to make, and that is whether to continue our Monday Malarkey races on IndieVelo given certain competing domestic demands (we have a lot of West London Cycling In Real Life events coming up) and the lack of suitable courses. We have reluctantly concluded that we should push Monday Malarkey Series 3 back to the autumn / fall of 2024 when we will have more capacity to organise them and, hopefully, IndieVelo will offer more courses to choose from. We apologise to those of you lookingb forward to our spring series, we had already put a lot into setting it up but, ultimately, the committments we have mean we have had to decide where to free up some time!
As we say, we have a lot of In Real Life events upcoming for the West London Cycling Community ….
Why not get into shape with our upcoming Reliability Ride on 2nd March from Uxbridge?
BRITISH CYCLING ENTRY PORTAL FOR THE RUSTYNAX RIDES
ORDER WEST LONDON CYCLING KIT HERE
There are loads of events happening in 2024, be part of the West London Scene
