Zwift Ride with Kickr Core

If you're serious about Zwifting, and happy to be tied to the platform, then the Zwift Ride with Kickr Core is essentially a fully-functioning smart bike with dedicated Zwift controls for the same price as a top-end direct-drive trainer, and as such it's hard to beat if you have room for a full-time setup and you're committed to Zwift as your app of choice.

> Get 10% off the Zwift Ride with Kickr Core with code ROADCCZ10

For more indoor training options, from budget buys to money-no-object, check out our guide to the best turbo trainers.

The Zwift Ride arrives in three boxes: one for the frame, one for the handlebar and one for the trainer. This seems a bit odd but actually makes quite a lot of sense, as anyone who's tried to move, for example, a Stages bike in a box on their own will attest. The boxes are heavy but they're a one-person job rather than needing to make sure that you have an extra pair of hands when it lands on your doorstep. It also means that postage is reasonable: Zwift will ship your bike to you in the UK for £65. Most smart bikes we've had arrive at the office have come on a pallet.

Zwift Ride with Kickr Core: Setup

Setting it up is easy. The Kickr Core is already set up with a Zwift Cog, and the steel frame simply attaches with a thru-axle. Everything on the bike is adjustable with a 6mm Allen key, and there's one supplied, which is held magnetically in a bay under the top tube.

The colour coding is simple: white bolts are ones you do once for setup, and orange bolts are ones you adjust for fit. Attaching the bar is really the only part that's a bit tricky, but anyone with a very basic understanding of what a bike looks like should be able to get it the right way round.

There's a chain dock in the the frame and a foot on the bottom so that you can sit it on the carpet without getting oil everywhere while you're setting up. Because the Zwift Ride does away with the front wheel, it's a pretty compact setup.

Once you've constructed your Zwift Ride it's time to get the fit dialled in. This is something that Zwift has done a fair bit of work on, and it shows. All smart bikes have adjustable bits with graduated markings, so you can set the bike up and make a note of your settings. Zwift's markings are letters, not numbers, and your bike comes with a cheat sheet: simply look for your height and it'll give you a basic setup for the three main adjustments (saddle height, bar height and reach) which is, generally: set all three to the same letter.

At 1.89m, my letter is T, and setting the bike up like that made it very rideable. It wasn't exactly right: I like my saddle nose down a degree or two, and riding indoors I like to jack my bar up a bit because it's comfier and aero's not a consideration. Your position probably won't be quite right off the card, either, but it's a useful starter.

One of the great things about a dedicated training frame like this is that two people can use it easily: just leave a note with your settings somewhere nearby. If you don't use the same saddle as the other rider in your household, a second seatpost is £49.99.

Zwift Ride with Kickr Core: Ride

Once you've got the bike on the trainer, plugged it in, made sure your controls are charged (there's a separate USB-C lead to charge each one, oddly) and turned them on, it's time to fire up Zwift and do some riding. Nearly everyone connects via Bluetooth these days but it's worth noting that virtual gearing only works via Bluetooth, so if you have an ANT+ connection available, don't use that. We're not at the point where Zwift actually sees this setup as a single unit – you need to pair all the bits individually. I've never had any issues doing so.

With everything connected and your avatar on the road in-game, the ride feel of the Zwift Ride is impressive. It doesn't have the slab-like quality of some smart bikes but that's probably a positive more than a negative; it feels stable enough for even hard sprints, but has a ride feel that's more 'bike' than 'piece of indoor equipment'.

The Zwift Ride uses a chain, not a belt, because that makes it easier to demount the frame from the trainer; there's a tensioner to take up the slack. Because of this it's not as quiet as a belt-drive smart bike (most of the others) but you'd hardly say it was noisy.

The 5.4kg freewheel on the Kickr Core has a chunk of angular momentum and smooths out your pedal stroke well, for a good ride feel. All the controls fall nicely to hand, and the whole experience is very good.

Riding with gears

The Zwift Ride with Kickr Core is a singlespeed setup like any other smart bike; it uses the Zwift Cog and the shifting is handled algorithmically in the game, adjusting the resistance as you move up and down the gears. It's important to note that it's different in this regard to other smart bikes. A Tacx Neo bike will change gear whatever it's connected to, or even if it's not connected to anything. With the Zwift Ride, you won't get any gear changes unless the Zwift app is running. So you're tied to Zwift for that functionality, and you need to be sure you're happy with that.

> Everything you need to know about group riding in Zwift

I say 'you're tied to Zwift' but in reality the trainer will work on any platform in ERG mode, where the trainer adjusts to hit a certain power level for intervals. So if you're into TrainerRoad, say, then you can basically use the Zwift Ride no problem, although you'll have a bunch of controls that don't do much. Indie Velo also allows you to change 'gears' by altering the resistance through the interface, but you'll need to do it with a keyboard, you can't use the Zwift Ride's buttons.

The gears are configurable. There are two buttons on each of the levers which you can assign functions to. Out of the box the Zwift Ride has 24 sequential gears: press one of the right-hand shifter buttons and you move to a harder gear, press a left-hand one and you move up the virtual block to an easier one.

You can, if you want, use a Shimano-style setup with two virtual chainrings, where the right-hand shifter is the rear and the left-hand the front. Or you can have a SRAM setup, where pressing left and right together switches between 'chainrings'. You might prefer that if you're used to changing gear a certain way; personally I've stuck with sequential through testing.

The shifting experience is okay, but I think it needs a tweak to get the best out of this system. Everything works, but other smart bikes are much better. The gold standard for smart bike shifting is the (admittedly expensive) Tacx Neo. That bike has a motor brake resistance unit that's capable of millisecond changes of resistance, quick enough to be able to replicate different surfaces through the trainer. On that bike you get an authentic-feeling 'clunk' and then an immediate switch to the next gear. The Kickr Core is a great trainer – the electromagnetic unit it uses can offer up to 1,800W of resistance and simulate a 16% grade. We've reviewed the Kickr Core Zwift One and the geared Kickr Core and both trainers scored very well. The virtual shifts don't match the immediacy of other, more expensive bikes, though.

When you shift to a higher gear, you get an immediate ramp up in resistance, then the resistance drops back reasonably slowly to a level above what it was before. On the way back down the resistance drops well below your selected gear before working its way back up again. In both cases, a full gear change – from a steady power to a steady power – can take up to 15 seconds.

Here's a plot of that happening. This is at a constant cadence, with the trainer difficulty turned off, so the only thing affecting the resistance is the gear selected. You can see on the way up to higher gears that sometimes the spike is considerable, and lengthy; for example, on the shift from 18 to 19, which equates to about 225W to 250W in terms of the resolved power of the gear at that cadence, I was pushing around 400W for nearly 10 seconds to get there. That's okay when I'm rolling around benchmarking a trainer; it's not okay when I'm in a race and trying not to blow up.

Similarly, the drops in power when changing down can be problematic; early on with the bike in a team time trial I was nearly dropped a couple of times as I swung off the front and shifted down a couple of gears, only for my power to tank and everyone else to ride off.

After a while you learn the nature of the gears and adjust your riding; mostly this is adjusting your cadence to compensate for the peaks and troughs. And sometimes the shift profile is useful: in intermediate sprints or a sprint for the line you can dump a few gears and you get a big resistance to push against, which gradually ebbs as the power in your legs does. Once you learn to use that to your advantage, sprinting is pretty good, and the trainer and bike combo is rock solid even when you're really giving it death in the last few hundred metres. Overall, though, I'd like to see the gear algorithm worked on.

Riding in ERG mode

Compare and contrast that with the Kickr Core's ERG mode, which is possibly the best of any trainer I've ever tried. It's quick to move to a new resistance level, either up or down. It hardly ever overshoots or undershoots, and even when it does it's just for a second or two. Here's a plot of a simple stepped interval from 50% of FTP up to 100%:

As you can see: quickly resolved changes, hardly any overshooting. Why can't the gear changing work like this? It's clearly not a physical limitation of the system. Anyway, the good news is that if you like a structured workout, you won't go wrong here.

Power accuracy

The Kickr Core has a claimed accuracy of +/- 2%, and when Jamie benchmarked it in his original review he found that it tracked extremely well against his bike-based power meter in both ERG and free riding modes.

I haven't specifically benchmarked the unit I have here because it's the same internally as the geared version. I can tell you that the numbers I'm getting from it are entirely believable, though. Currently I'm racing in the Cs and after a summer of doing long distance riding at no great pace, my top-end power has taken a bit of a kicking and I'm struggling more than I normally would. I could put that down to the trainer, I suppose. But we all know it's not that...

We did put a number of bikes, from the dedicated Zwift Ride frame to a highly inappropriate folder, on the Kickr Core Zwift One for a recent video, and I did perform a quick five-minute power comparison on each. The results were as you'd expect, with the numbers matching very closely (a bit less so for the folder!). I'm happy that the setup is delivering believable and repeatable results.

Zwift Ride with Kickr Core: A list of quibbles

I think the Zwift Ride Frame and the Kickr Core together are a strong choice for a dedicated setup if you're going to be picking Zwift as your platform of choice for the indoor miles. However, there are a few things that annoy me a bit, and it does feel like a version one product at times.

I've opined at length about whether the virtual shifting is as good as it could be. There are a few other oddities too. The controls pair as a single unit, so that's an improvement on the Zwift Play controllers, but why doesn't the app see the trainer and the controls, and pair them as one thing? Also, why do you have to charge the two controllers separately?

My last moan: the controller on/off buttons are in a place where you can accidentally turn off one of the sides with your palm, especially if you're going hard and gripping the bars like death. This has happened to me in a sprint intervals session where it was inconvenient; in a race it's probably game over.

Zwift Ride with Kickr Core: Value and overall

Smart bikes are expensive. The Wahoo Kickr Bike Shift is £2,699, and that's the cheapest of the two that Wahoo makes (though it's currently reduced to £2,199.99). You can still pick up the now-discontinued Tacx Neo Bike Smart for around two grand which, given the performance, is a good deal. Or buy the new 'Plus' version for £3,499 which, given the minimal upgrades, isn't. There are dedicated smart bikes for less than £2,000; we've just taken delivery of a Wattbike Proton which retails for £1,795, so stay tuned for a review of that.

Anyway, against that backdrop, £1,199 for what is in effect a fully functional smart bike looks like a bit of a bargain, really. It's objectively not as good as the Tacx or the Wahoo bikes, but it's still good, and it's half the price, or less. Yes, you're tied to Zwift, but at current subs prices you can ride Watopia for about eight and a half years with the saving you make over the Kickr Bike Shift.

If you're racing at an elite level it might not be the setup for you, but if you're a regular chopper like me then it has a lot to recommend it: solid construction, good ride feel, accurate power, useful and dedicated controls. I expect the shifting – which is algorithmic and not hardware-based – to improve as things get tweaked over time. The other foibles I could easily live with; the next version of the Zwift Ride might address some of them, but there's no real reason not to take the plunge now if you're after a dependable Zwift setup for your pain cave.

> Buy now: Zwift Ride with Kickr Core for £1,199.99 from Zwift

Verdict

Great value dedicated smart bike setup for Zwifters with a permanent pain cave