Heats
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Best
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Two-lap track sprint against one rival: tap a steady pedal cadence, tuck into the slipstream, and pick the moment for your single 9-second kick. Every heat you win brings a stronger rival.
Tap PEDAL (or the track) to ride — every tap is one pedal stroke, and 5 taps a second (150 rpm) is full power; tapping faster adds nothing. Press KICK once per heat for your final sprint. The race is two laps of a 250 m track, 500 m in all, and the heat starts with your first tap.
Riding right behind the rival puts you in the slipstream: within 2 m the air drag drops by 32 %, fading to nothing at 10 m. You hold the same speed with fewer taps, and pedalling below 35 % power (under 1.75 taps a second) lets your legs bar refill. A tired rider loses up to 40 % of top power, so the legs bar matters by the bell.
KICK opens with a 1-second jump at 2.2× power, then holds 1.7× power. At full cadence the kick reserve lasts 9 seconds. When it runs out you are cooked: 80 % power until the line. The rival rides on the same rules and kicks somewhere between 260 m and 150 m from the finish, or about half a second after you kick on the last lap.
Win the heat and you face a rival who is 4 % stronger — the first rival rides at 78 % of your power and there is no ceiling. Lose once and the run is over. Your score is heats won, with the sum of your winning margins (to 0.01 s) as the tie-break.
The slipstream is the whole game. Holding 15 m/s alone costs roughly 1.4 times the taps it costs a metre behind the rival, and the legs you save there are the top-end power you will have in the last lap. So when the rival leads, sit tight on its wheel and let it do the work. If it soft-pedals in front of you to make you lead, you can sit up and wait too — it will not go below 12 m/s, and the longer you stay behind, the fresher your legs.
Your kick is a one-shot 9-second burst, and at sprint speed that covers roughly 150–170 m. Launch from much farther out and you will be cooked at 80 % power before the line; launch too late and the rival's own kick has already gone. A strong moment is just after the rival commits: its kick starts somewhere between 260 m and 150 m to go, so if you are still on its wheel when it jumps, follow within a fraction of a second and come around in the final straight.
Leading is not hopeless — it just has a price. A rival sitting on your wheel saves its own legs and can jump you. If you find yourself in front, try a surprise kick from about 200 m: the rival needs about half a second to react, and every metre you open before it responds is a metre it has to make up without your slipstream once the gap passes 10 m.
Margins count. The rival gets 4 % stronger every heat with no ceiling, so every run ends, and two runs with the same number of wins are separated by the summed winning margins. Winning the early, easy heats by a full second instead of a whisker is how you climb the Hall of Fame.