Hi all!
Just curious if people outside Sweden is aware of the race novemberkasan?
The gnarliest enduro race there is, I believe.
I have not heard of it. Here in the US we might disagree though. We used to have a race that was not an enduro but a cross-country. It was a little thing called The Blackwater 100. I can hardly imagine something tougher. Dwight Rudder you surely rode the Blackwater. If so give it a tough rating.
You stirred the cobwebs with that question!!!
I have read about the event in the book " Mr. Moto-Cross" by Torsten Hallman. He said that they started on Sat. morn and ran through the nite till Sunday evening. They usually had snow, ice and cold to contend with. He spoke of running out of gas in the nite and walking for two hours to find fuel and then pushing on. This was an enduro, not a closed course loop that was run over and over. Is my information correct??
All the Swedes on the Husky Trans-Am team talked about how they would set the timing closer to TDC for that event so they could bump the engine and get it to run backwards so they could back out of the snow drifts,like useing reverse to get unstuck in a car.
If you ever run into Jeff Fredette, (20 plus six-days and just as many medals) talk to him about it. He rode that event a few years back, said it was very difficult and cold.
Rocket
Well, it depends a whole lot on the weather too. November is the beginning of the winter here and somtimes the ground is frosen. That means an easy race but mostly It´s wet and muddy. There are often around 300 starters and sometimes only 10 making it through. Nowadays they have the lamp on the helmet but a few years back they only had the bike mounted lamps bouncing up and down making the riders sick. They often had to stop just to throw up and couldn´t eat and barely drink a little.
Some years it´s much more easy but when it´s as worst nothing really can be much worse without beeing cancelled beacause someone just have to finish, otherwise there won´t be any results.
Here in sweden the general piont of view is that there are very good enduro riders around the world but they wouldn´t make a Novemberkasan unless they are Finnish riders of course, they know too what it´s all about.
The speed is almost never the issue. It´s an ironman thing combined with some luck.
Dirtbike,
Have you ever rode in this event? How many miles are covered? It sounds like something John Penton might have wanted to try in his younger days, maybe on a NSU or a BMW.