TrainingPeaks Virtual fully supports “proper” Team Time Trials.
- Drafting only between members of the same team.
- All timings (including intermediate splits) taken on the N-th rider, where 'N' is the number of rider set by the event organizer.
- Ability to choose your own team, with your own custom kit for all riders to wear.
Additionally, just like in a real-life TTT, when you are riding you won’t get to see how the other teams are doing, apart from at each checkpoint along the course. At each checkpoint, you’ll see live time gaps between the teams pop up as they pass. You and your team will need to use skill and tactics to decide how to respond.
Event Creation
Anyone can create their own custom Team Time Trial event at any time. Simply select the Team Time Trial option from the list of available event types when creating your own event.
When creating a Team Time Trial, as well as all the usual fully customizable event parameters (course, entry criteria, performance verification level etc), you can also define:
- Minimum Team Size
- Maximum Team Size
- Which rider number timings will be taken from
You can also control the total number of teams to compete against by setting the desired field size. For example, by setting a field size of 30, and team min/max size of 5, there will be a total of 6 teams. By tuning the custom event parameters to your own preferences, you can create whatever type of event you want – from a Team Pursuit on the Velodrome, through to a traditional Grand Tour Team Time Trial on the Road.
Unless the “human-only” option is selected, any team that does not have sufficient numbers of people in the pen when it closes, will have racebots added to it to ensure it meets the minimum team size and can ride the event. In a Team Time Trial, all racebots have a dedicated AI where they will intelligently try to pace the depletion of their energy levels and automatically close gaps to ride as efficiently as possible.
Note that currently, Team Time Trials are all unranked. In due course, a full Team ranking system will be developed which Team Time Trial results will feed into, but for now results do not count towards individual ratings and rankings.
Event Mechanics
When joining a Team Time Trial event, you will join a pen with all the other riders who are competing. With one minute to go before the start, riders will be grouped into teams (using your own selected team, if you have joined any, or automatically allocating you to a team with other riders of a similar ability to you if not) and put into separate pens. This means that anyone can now ride a Team Time Trial at any time, even if they don’t have a team of their own.
Each team then rides the course simultaneously and will receive split time information from the other teams at each checkpoint along the course. Once riders have completed the course and crossed the finish line, teams will automatically merge back into the same world again and be able to see and chat to each other for any post-race socializing etc.
TrainingPeaks Virtual tactical positioning AI means that each rider will, by default, always position themselves in an optimal position for the draft between riders, taking into account wind direction/strength, racing lines around corners etc etc. Riders can then choose to move away from that (for example, when rotating positions in the pace line) by using the Tactical Positioning options.
It is also worth noting that if you are riding with bots, then because their AI will work to close/maintain gaps between the riders then you can – to an extent – control their pace. By speeding up and closing the gap on the rider ahead, they’ll then also speed up to open it back up again and any bots behind you will also speed up to close the gap behind (and vice versa when slowing down). Obviously, you won’t know how quickly their energy levels are depleting and how much they’ve got left in the tank, so pushing on is a risk…but that’s true when riding with other humans too!