Story: Noel Flatters - Editor, The Enduro Bureau
July 30, 2024

Manuel Lettenbichler (Red Bull KTM Factory Racing) returned to the FIM Hard Enduro World Championship in Romania just five weeks after knee surgery and put on an absolute masterclass in how to dominate a multi-day event through a combination of speed and race management. After putting 34 minutes into the field on off-road Day 1, there was really no question that the German Hard Enduro surgeon was going to bring home his 5th win in the past six years, barring major physical or mechanical issues. In this article we’re going to take an analytical look at how Lettenbichler won again this year, and how he’s been able to dominate the race over the past several years. Let’s go!

Mani came into the 2024 edition of Red Bull Romaniacs just five weeks after undergoing surgery for a recurring meniscus injury that was causing his knee to lock out. There was, obviously, some questions as to his readiness for the race after missing Round 3 of the FIM Hard Enduro World Championship, but after an epic “We are back b$tches” post the week before it was clearly game on.

Mani started the week with a very respectable P3 in the prologue, finishing behind Red Bull Beta Factory Racing’s Jonny Walker and Rieju Factory Off-Road’s Alfredo Gomez. Mani probably didn’t expect to win the prologue against a specialist like Walker who had his number throughout the SuperEnduro series, but he did exactly what he needed to do in terms of not throwing away time in the short seeding race. Not to mention that the German hasn’t ever won a Romaniacs prologue (he did win the 2023 Red Bull Outliers prologue over Billy Bolt and Trystan Hart, though!).

Off-Road Day 1 was a monster stage, and Lettenbichler simply destroyed the field by finishing with a 34 minute advantage. In the LiveManiacs section early in the race he was able to arrive far enough ahead of the field that he avoided any bottlenecks with other riders in order to most effectively build on the early lead. From there it was head down racing with the goal of building up as big a cushion as possible.

From Day 1 to the finish Mani never won another stage, with Sherco Factory Racing teammates Mario Roman and Teodor Kabakchiev leading the way home on Days 2/3/4. Mani was, however, able to finish P2 on Days 2 and 3, and P4 on Day 4. Even more importantly, he kept the time gap to the winners within 4 minutes on Days 2/3, and 9 minutes on Day 4 to finish with an overall margin of 00:33.22s over Kabakchiev and 00:35:37s over Roman.

There’s a couple of questions that arise from this. Was Mani in race management mode after his big first day, especially considering that he probably lost fitness during his surgery recovery, or were Kabakchiev and Roman simply that much better over the final three days of racing? Let’s dig in and consider it a bit.

The simple answer is that he most likely was in race management mode for the last three days. Not to take anything away from the Sherco duo who were putting in great rides to pick up stage wins over Mani, but Mani has simply been on another level from the rest of the championship for more than a year. For example, his performance at Red Bull Erzbergrodeo just before his knee injury shows his ability to crush single day races – he took the win there by 20 minutes from FMF KTM Factory Racing’s Trystan Hart.

If you dig a little deeper statistically into Mani’s history at Romaniacs, you can also see that this year’s win fits the pattern of how he’s won 5 out of the last 6 years:

At a high level, what we see is that over the past four years Mani has had one big (in terms of time differential - greater than 10m) off-road day win. The aberration in this pattern is, obviously, 2022 where he ended up losing to Graham Jarvis (who picked up his incredible 7th overall win at the event. On Day 1 of 2022 you can see that Mani lost an astounding 2h19m2s to Jarvis, but that was a result of a broken clutch that required outside assistance to repair resulting in a 2hr penalty. If we subtract that penalty from his final/overall time deficit of 1h52m26s to Jarvis we can surmise that Mani would have finished in P1 overall (all other things being equal) with a 27-minute advantage.

Just as a sidenote, Mani went through each checkpoint fastest or second-fastest that day, with the exception of CP6 when his clutch broke,
and he finished 15th fastest 29m31s back. But that’s hard enduro for you… absolutely anything can happen and you can’t win if you
can’t get yourself to the finish intact!

The numbers also show that Mani has never won more than two days in any given year at Romaniacs. This is likely a testament to how difficult the race is, combined with the requirement to manage body and bike over four days of off-road racing. You can see that in 2023 and 2024, though, that Mani appears to have adopted a strategy of going for the killing blow on Day 1 rather than riding the most consistently through the full event. You can’t argue with the strategy at all, it seems pretty effective for him.

The other thing that becomes apparent in Mani’s approach to Romaniacs is how consistently close he is to the winner on the days that he doesn’t win. If we remove the outlier data point from the broken clutch day in 2022, his average time loss is only 2m50s through the six years of data we’re looking at. We can also take a look at average finishing position by day over the six years and see that it’s P3.84. If you remove the outlying P17 and replace it with P4 (rounded up average finish) it comes out P2.84. Talk about minimizing bad days!

And that, in our humble opinion, is the formula to winning Red Bull Romaniacs and other multi-day events. ESPECIALLY in an era where athletes are becoming more fit, faster, and better technical riders across the board as the sport progresses.

Thanks for checking out this article, and thanks (as always!) for supporting North American-based Enduro and Off-Road journalism.