On the back of the announcement last week that we will move to zwiftracing.app for categorisation of racers in Season 4 of DRS. We’re pleased to say that we’ve now completed the update of the rules so you can start checking out your potential team-mates!
TL;DR: Registration for DRS Season 4 is open … but you still need to read below for the category rules and instructions on what to do.
All the rules are live on https://www.dirtracingseries.com/series-rules-scoring/.
Just a little point about the rating we have chosen to use. We are using the Max 30-day Rating as the rating number that will define your DRS Category. We’ve chosen this rather than the live rating because it prevents anyone’s DRS category being affected by races that they chose just to ride as a group ride (rather than race all out).
It is easy to see on every rider’s profile page – here’s a screenshot of mine from https://www.zwiftracing.app/riders/916206 – and here our the categories that we are going to run. These have been checked against participation in Season 3 and we believe that they should lead to a very similar number of riders per category to prior DRS seasons.
We do of course recognise that teams might need to look a little different with the move away from 20-minute power categories. So we want you to know that the rating limits are the MAXIMUM for each category – so you can just pick the category of your highest rank rider to stick together if you wish. Riders should always feel free to race up in DRS, the category boundaries are pretty small so no-one should be concerned about choosing to race-up.
We also want to try and keep teams together for the season! We know that as you win, your rating will go up, obvs! We don’t ever want to penalise that and we would love to see the same teams all the way through the season.
Therefore, unless you do a real category-busting performance (that shows you were under-ranked beforehand), you’ll be able to see the whole season out, even if your ranking increases above the category limit during the DRS season.
And it is really easy to make sure that you are correctly ranked. Just make sure you do a Qualifying Race (pretty much any race that isn’t ZRL, a TTT, nor a Chase race) in the 30-days prior to registration freeze where you included a real full-gaz 5-minute effort. If you’ve done that, then you won’t be able to upgrade out of category during the season. Great examples of races to do this in would be events on https://www.zwiftracing.app/, the Tiny Races on a Saturday, or the Zwift ZRacing series https://www.zwift.com/eu/racing/racing-events.
Lastly, we are going to try and keep all the timezones going from Season 3. But we only want to run events where people really want to race … so its Use it or Lose it time. Atlantic and US Pacific crews – you need to get all your buddies and frenemies registering for Season 4 if you want it to continue for Season 5! We will promote as hard as we can, but we need your help too.
In Europe, we are trying to keep both timezones going even as people head outside … BUT you will see that there is a half-hour window on the 2 time slots.
EMEA C is 18:15 – 18:45 BST (UK Time)
EMEA W is 18:45 – 19:15 BST (UK Time)
Provided that we have enough teams and riders registering we will run them at the same time as Season 4 – EMEA C at 18:15 and EMEA W at 19:15. BUT – if either timezone looks too empty for any of the categories, we reserve the right to collapse into a single timezone running in the middle at 18:45. We’ll take that decision with about 1-week to go.
So get registering your teams and some riders as early as possible – and it is easy to do!
1) For returning teams:
Head over to your Teams Editing Page – here:
https://www.dirtracingseries.com/your-teams/
Click on the Team(s) you want to EDIT and select one of the new categories … this registers your team for Season 4. ✅ You can change this category at any point prior to Registration close on Friday 14th April so just pick your best guess at this stage.
This will copy all existing riders to the new team – please remember to delete any riders not riding in Season 4.
2) For new teams:
Head to the Register Now page and following the instructions:
https://www.dirtracingseries.com/register-now/
Oh, and we’ve done the course selections , and they look great, and we’ve got some crazy ideas to mix up the “TTT” too, so it will be there but it won’t be like normal!
So get registering and we’ll share those details in a few weeks time!