The Red Bull Romaniacs Extreme Enduro Rally was founded in 2004, and they claim that over the years it’s become the world’s toughest Hard Enduro Rally. It’s a five-day event over 375 miles in the Carpathian Mountains, and it attracts some of the best off-road riders in the world. Until this year, every competitor was on a single-cylinder dirt bike, but for 2017 two entrants showed up with twins. KTM brought a new 1090 Adventure that was supposed to be piloted by Chris Birch, but he broke his hand while searching for a photo shoot location a few days before the event. He was replaced by 4-time Baja 1000 winner and fellow big enduro expert Quinn Cody. That’s impressive enough, but I’m more interested in the other twin that was entered – a highly modified BMW prepped by Touratech that they call the R9X. Both bikes entered the Iron Class (a slightly easier route) and Gerhard Forster was able to pilot the R9X to 14th place. Luckily for us, Touratech created a series of videos that will take you through the event!
Here’s the first video, so you can see if you want to watch all nine clips. The first three deal with preparation, while the remaining six are on site. Click here if you want to see the rest. Note that Gerhard speaks German so you’ll probably want to click the “CC” button in the bottom right corner, turn on German subtitles, and then click it again to switch to “Auto-Translate” and then pick the language of your choice. Or, try this link on Touratech, where some of the videos have been dubbed in English.
I’ve been fairly disappointed with the RnineT Urban GS (more on that coming later this week in a review), but this is a RnineT build that I would absolutely love to own.
This bike-uriousity brought to you by Nathan M!