1. Start slowly and work up to your pace.
2. Practice a lot. You want smooth change-overs and a tight pace line. Large gaps mean the person who has just finished their pull will need to sit out in the wind longer waiting for the back of the pace line. Also realize that you are going super fast, so when you are dropping back, you have to maintain a higher fraction of your speed, because accelerating to get back on the back of the line is going to be super taxing. You won't last long if you have to put out 500 watts to accelerate up to the speed of the pace line.
3. Check your ego at the door. This is a team effort. Surging or accelerating the pace will kill one or more of your teammates and you will ultimately have to go slower.
4. The real trick is finding a pace that everyone can take a pull for at least 30 seconds. Once you have that pace/effort, the stronger guys take longer pulls. On a flat road there should really be no change of pace, but the length of the pulls could vary from 30-120 seconds depending on how different people's fitness varies.
5. While there is no hard and fast rule, I would say a good power profile would be something like: pull at 110% of FTP for 1 minute, drop back at 90% of FTP for 30 seconds, accelerate at 110-120% FTP for 15 seconds to get back on, rest 2 minutes at 80-85% FTP, repeat. Try practicing this power profile on the trainer for 30 minutes and you will understand the importance of not having to put out 130+% of your FTP getting on the back of the pace line :-).

Where does this take place?

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Pink? Maybe. Maybe not. You decide.

Have done some 2 man TTTs with a good friend. The best advice is to spend time figuring out the ability differences between the members and as a previous responder mentioned this needs be a very honest process. The stronger riders need to take longer turns and do so without hammering themselves or the slower riders into the red. The previous statement constitutes stupidly obvious advice, but is extremely difficult to master.

Most of all make sure you are all having fun and see the teamwork element as a challenge to conquer. It is easy to get frustrated when the pacing has gone awry and explode at each other.

As mentioned, practice a lot. Your goals for practice are to figure out what watts to target and how long each person can pull. Say everyone can do 300w for 30s-1m. The guy on front is always holding 300w. Depending on how strong he is he may only pull for 30s. Another rider may pull for 1m. This keeps your speed up. You don't want everyone pulling for the same amount of time, this will result in the weaker rider holding 250w for a minute. Keep your speed up!

Practice practice practice the start and the turnaround. You'll need some help on practicing the starts as you'll all want to be clipped in and need someone holding y'all up. On the turnaround decide how y'all are going to do it. Is the lead rider going to lead everyone around the cone or are you going to have the lead rider come out of the turnaround at the rear and the last rider come out first. The second way puts a fresher rider at the front ready to crank it back up to speed.

The hardest thing to do is not to go too hard when you go to the front. If you go even a little too hard it makes it super hard for the person who just came off the front to get back on, resulting in them losing some of their precious little recovery. Pay attention to the speed/cadence you are holding when you are 2nd in line and when you go to the front, just keep that or you can slightly up the effort once the guy who just came off the front is back on. I recommend having one person as the team leader and everyone listens to him. And if you communicate with your team, yell as loud as you can and as simply as you can. If you are getting gapped off, yell "Off!" as soon as it starts to happen and once you are back on, yell "On!". Also, when you come off the front, make it very obvious by swinging off fairly abruptly. All other moves should be very subtle but when you come off the front you want everyone to know.

The last one I did was not a 'real' organized race but a 100km gravel TTT, with tons of limerock, about 25km of soft sand. About 70km total on non roads. And it was a total blast. We used the following strategy: make sure I'm never leading in the corners on sand or if I am don't follow my wheel, because it's likely the worst trajectory. The rest turned into a hammer fest and I'm pretty sure we even tried to hurt each other. Bottom line is...TTT are awesome. Do them! So is gravel.

http://www.gravelcyclist.com/...e-trial-ride-report/

Lots of good advice above. Know the course as well as you can. Don't let your strongest climber be on the front on the hills 'cuz he'll fry everybody. Don't let your strongest grinder on the flats be on the front on the flats or he'll kill everybody (although the latter is not as bad as the former). Make sure everyone understands that it's better for them to take no pull (just come through and come off) than to get dropped. Everyone needs to stay within themselves and a TTT is pretty much an exercise in the group riding to the lowest common denominator. That's tempered by having stronger folks take longer pulls.

COMMUNICATE! If you're having trouble, let the team know. If you're the weak link and you know it going in, but you're having a good day, let your teammates know it.

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Stay aero my friends.

no one should try to be a hero, ie if you are a weak link,drop back. do not try and stay up front to put in your fair share, reducing group speed and burning yourself out. a TTT is a great place for communism.......abilities...needs

Practice, practice, practice....It's way trickier that it looks to optimize and make a TTT work well. Also, the pain and suffering of going over and under lactate threshold without going below zone 3 in a TTT is quite the experience. I did these in collegiate cycling so I've seen common mistakes and committed them as well plenty of times.

We would have the guy on the front maintain a steady speed/power but alter the time length of the pull based on how strong the rider was. So the front may be a certain speed or 400 watts or whatever but the variation in length of pull may be 5-10 seconds or up to a minute, especially later in the race. This keeps everything smooth and doesn't blow your weakest link right away. If you don't have power meters, remember if it's flat, your gearing and cadence should stay the same when you go from second to the front. It just feels way harder but maintains the same, steady speed.

One of the stupidest things to do is blow the weakest rider immediately. Everyone will want to pull their weight which is stressful for the weakest rider. In my experience, this leads to that rider trying to do too much and popping themselves early. It's way more useful to have that extra rider rotating through even if they spend 5 seconds on the front because it gives the other riders more rest. We would usually try to keep everyone at least halfway through the course.

Hills - on uphills, a longer steady pull is good and you can rotate off at the top. Downhills = really fast rotations. Again, it doesn't make sense to pop someone on a hill for 5 seconds of time when having them the rest of the course will earn back more than that 5 seconds probably.

Communication - Talk - Make sure you communicate if people are doing poorly. Also, make sure you are on the same page regarding crosswinds.

Finish cross eyed or you didn't do it right. Have fun! It's a really exciting event and magic when it works well!

I did a 4-man TTT in 2015 that went pretty well . . . . with no practice with the team. It was a (roughly) 30-mile course which was an out-and-back configuration. We all knew each others' relative abilities and it sort of naturally fell into place.

We had one major mistake though, my brother fell off the pace around mile 23. I didn't see him lose contact off the back. Time was taken on the third rider to cross the line, so we continued on with three. You can see in the graph below clearly that our average speed dropped (some of it was due to a building headwind) but you can very CLEARLY see my increased heart rate and lack of rest between pulls after he dropped off.

As others mentioned, communication is KEY. If we would have known he was suffering, it would have been better to have him sit in for a few rotations then take every other pull or every third. At least we would have made use of his strength and allowed him to recover when he needed. I made damn sure to communicate with our strongest guy when I was suffering near the end. He wanted to ramp the pace and he was behind me. Each time I'd pull off, I'd plead with him to keep it steady so I could get back into the draft! :-D

We still won our Category (Cat 3), but there wasn't much competition to be honest. It was an absolute BLAST since I love to time trial. I can't wait to do another one.

We used to use a 1 to 5 scale. Start with a planned time each rider pulls at the front, say 30 to 40 seconds. When you pull off you shout a number letting the new lead know where you are at. 3 means your at the effort you can carry - all's well. 2 means my tanks full, don't kill yourself, 4 means I'm struggling, stay out a little longer if you've got it. If you practice, it's a good way to adjust time at the front and keep everyone together.

I've done at least 10+ TTTs over the years, including a number of 4-man 100ks and a bunch of five-mans around 30 or 40 miles.

Ride at what seems to be within yourself in the beginning. Smooth is the key. As fast as you can go smooth.

Pull off before you slow down. If 2nd rider says "off" first rider should pull off. 2nd rider can often sense it earlier

Communication is key if things are not going well, but don’t talk much if you can avoid it. No drama, but talk if you have to. The best time is while drifting back/another rider is drifting back. Soft - don't waste breath. The only time to shout is if there is a major error - such as someone dropped and the other guys don't notice. Then yell "off" and when you're back on it's "on."

If coming out of a turn/turnaround where people had to slow, take care to come out steady so everyone is together.

Vary length of pulls by relative strengths of riders, including how they feel. One of the most satisfying TTTs I did had a 3-person team where one guy was pulling for 90 seconds or more, I was pulling for 30 seconds and the third guy just went through and off. He was our weakest link (he’s crashed the day before) but time was off the 3rd rider and so we could not drop him. We beat at least one five-man team.

Put the weakest rider behind the biggest, smoothest rider if possible.

Shorter pulls tend to be faster. Later in event if everyone is feeling good, shorten the pulls if you want to raise the pace a little.

Go slower than you think uphill, which allows longer pulls. Shorter pulls downhill.

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http://www.jt10000.com/

Check out the course too. We have a (kind of) local TTT in Sidney NY, it is an out and back. No turns, the turnaround is in a 4 way intersection (with police coverage) and a round-a-bout about 2/3's of the way out (and 1/3 of the way back).

The round-a-bout is on a very flat part of the road so the speeds are really high in both directions (25-30 mph) and it pays to have someone to pick a fast and safe line through on the front.

One year we passed a team while entering the turn around, we had not practiced passing of any kind so it was mayhem!

Also it goes without saying that you should find out if there are any hazards like cracks parallel to the travel direction, bad pot holes, heaves, dips, rocks, whatever.

rich