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Guide

How to make a custom ride profile

The built-in profiles cover most riders. For everyone else, custom profiles let you dial in exactly what makes a road worth riding to you.

· 4 min read

Sport, touring, ADV, and cruiser cover the big buckets. But riding styles don't always fit clean categories — plenty of people ride a sport-tourer with a 70/30 lean toward sport, or a big ADV bike that lives mostly on pavement, or a cruiser that gets taken on weekend canyon runs. Custom profiles exist for exactly those cases: you set the weights yourself, save them, and MotoScore scores roads through your lens rather than a generic one.

Where to find it

Open the profile selector in the sidebar (desktop) or bottom sheet (mobile) and click Custom → New custom profile. You'll get the profile editor, which shows six sliders — one for each scoring factor — plus a name field and a save button.

If you already have a saved custom profile, it'll appear in the profile list alongside the built-ins, and you can switch to it with one click.

What each slider controls

Each slider sets the weight that factor carries in the final score. The weights are normalised under the hood, so moving one slider up effectively moves the others down relative to each other — you don't need to make them sum to 100 yourself.

Curvature. How much tight turns, switchbacks, and sustained cornering contribute. Crank this up if you're chasing corners. Drop it if you want a mile-eater profile.

Elevation change. Total climb and descent. Push it up if you like climbing passes and hate flat roads. Push it down if climb is a neutral factor for you.

Surface quality. Paved and smooth scores high; rough scores low. The one exception is ADV-style riding — if you want rough surfaces to count positively, use the dedicated ADV profile rather than trying to invert this slider. The custom editor weights surface conventionally; it doesn't flip the scale.

Vertical exposure. How much drops, ridges, and open landscape alongside the road contribute. Push up if you love exposed ridge roads. Push down if you prefer forest-covered backroads where the landscape is close and intimate.

Altitude ceiling. How much the route's maximum elevation contributes. Push up if high-altitude riding is a major part of why you ride. Push down if you live at sea level and don't care about this.

Scenic impact. Composite landscape score — coastlines, canyons, vistas. Push up if views matter more to you than technical riding. Push down if you'd rather ride a tight canyon at the bottom of a valley than a view-loaded mesa road.

Tips for dialling in a profile

The mistake most people make is treating the sliders like a graphic equaliser and cranking three or four of them to max. That just produces a profile that scores everything high, which isn't useful. A few practices that work better:

Start from the closest built-in profile. Pick sport, touring, ADV, or cruiser — whichever is already closest to how you ride — and copy its weights as your starting point. The editor has a Copy from existing option that does this in one click. Then tweak from there.

Adjust one factor at a time. Change one slider, save, re-score a route you know well, and see if the number moved in the direction you expected. Then change the next one. Moving four sliders at once and then wondering why the score changed is a losing game.

Calibrate against a route you know well. This is the single most important step. Pick a road you've ridden at least three times and have a strong opinion about. Score it with your new profile. Does the number match how you'd describe the road to a friend? If your favourite road scores 68 and your least-favourite scores 84, the weights are wrong. Adjust and re-score until the numbers feel right on roads you already know.

Calibrate against multiple roads, not just one. A profile that scores your favourite road correctly but everything else incorrectly isn't calibrated — it's overfit to one example. Score three or four known roads and look at the relative ordering. If the ranking matches your intuition, the profile is working even if the absolute numbers are a few points off what you'd predict.

A worked example

Say you ride a sport-tourer and you like corners more than scenery, but you also care about altitude — low-elevation roads feel flat to you no matter how twisty they are.

Starting from the touring profile, you might:

Score your favourite local canyon — now it's slightly higher than it was on touring. Score the Million Dollar Highway — still scores in the 90s (curvature, elevation, and altitude all contributing). Score a flat Midwestern cruise — scores lower than touring would have given it, because the profile now requires altitude and corners to produce a high number.

That's a calibrated custom profile. Save it as Sport-tourer (or whatever you want to call it) and use it going forward.

Saving and switching profiles

Profiles save to your account if you're signed in. You can have as many named custom profiles as you want — Daily, Weekend canyons, Long tour, whatever split makes sense. The profile selector shows built-ins and your custom profiles together; click to switch, and the currently-loaded route re-scores immediately.

If you're not signed in, custom profiles save to local storage on your current device and won't follow you to another browser or phone. Sign in if you want them to sync.

When to not use custom

Honestly, most riders don't need custom. The built-in profiles are tuned against real rides and real rider feedback, and they're usually closer to what you want than a first-pass custom profile will be. If your scores on known roads already feel right, skip the editor — you don't need it.

Custom is for the case where you've tried a built-in profile, scored a handful of known roads, and the numbers consistently feel off in a particular direction. Then you know which factor to move, and the sliders do exactly that.