Originally Posted by
himespau
Which makes it sort of funny to me that zwift uses a straight up 95% of the best 20 minutes in any ride as your FTP (and zwiftpower uses the average of your best 3 95% efforts) to determine your race classification. Now that Zwift owns zwiftpower, I'd love to see them go to using their race rankings to place people. Maybe use their made up FTP calculation to find a general starting cat for the first 10 races (not everyone needs to start out as a D if pack safety isn't an issue) and then switch over to race rankings after that.
I used to laugh at my power files after crits. My ftp was easily in the 240-260 range but if I took a peak 20 minutes average from a race then it would have been 300+. Don't hold me to it but I could have sworn I had one race where I "averaged" 320 or so.... but I blew up about 25 minutes in. To quote Robby Ventura - "you have a monster anaerobic system and you're just burning the hell out of it to stay in the race. You have the aerobic system of a child." My power file would look like something off a seismograph during an earthquake.
Point being - if Zwift used my best 20 minute performance in a race and I just happened to be using a calibrated trainer at the time then they very well could easily think my FTP was over 300. I can assure you it most definitely is not.