Score
0
Best
-
One button decides a two-up finish: draft to save energy, cover his move, and pick the metre to come around.
You and one rival ride to the line and there is a single control: hold anywhere to push harder, let go to sit up. Sitting directly behind the rival puts you in his slipstream, which cuts air resistance by about a third, so the same speed costs far less energy. The bar at the bottom is your anaerobic reserve: pushing above your steady pace drains it, it refills only slowly when you ease off, and once it is empty you cannot exceed that steady pace at all. The rival saves himself the same way and attacks at a point he has chosen, and he responds harder the further ahead you get. Win and the next rival is stronger and the road is longer; lose once and the run is over. Your score is the number of finishes you take.
Two facts decide every finish here, and both are physical rather than tactical. The first is that air resistance rises with the cube of speed, so at racing speed almost all of your effort is spent pushing air rather than moving your own weight. Tucking in directly behind the rival removes about a third of that, which is why the wheel is worth so much: you are travelling at his speed for two thirds of his cost.
The second is that your legs above your steady pace are a tank with no refill worth speaking of. The bar drains fast when you push and creeps back slowly when you ease. That means the game does not ask how hard you can go, it asks how many seconds of hard you can afford, and where you spend them.
Put those together and the losing strategies explain themselves. Never pushing loses every single race, because the rival will always go at some point and you have to answer. Full gas from the gun wins about half against the earliest rivals and nothing at all once they are strong, because you empty the tank into the wind while he sits behind you paying two thirds. Riding on the front the whole way wins about a third for the same reason. And sitting in without ever attacking loses every race — the wheel saves your legs but it never wins a bike race by itself.
What actually works is one line: sit in, answer his move the moment he goes so you stay on the wheel while he burns, and come around inside the last sixty to ninety metres. That wins essentially every early race, and once the rivals are stronger it is the only thing that wins at all. The reason is that going with him costs you far less than it costs him, so when you both arrive at the last hundred metres you have the deeper tank.
The two ways to get this wrong are symmetric. Come around too early — three hundred metres out or more — and you become the one in the wind, and he does to you exactly what you were planning to do to him. Leave it too late, inside the last twenty-five metres, and there is simply not enough road left to make up the length even at full power. The window is narrow and it gets narrower as the rivals improve, which is what eventually ends the run.