WHEN I FINALLY LINED UP to race the Adventure Ultimate class at the 2026 Red Bull Romaniacs, it felt like the culmination of something much bigger than one race. People could look at me on a KTM 890 Adventure R and think this was another bloke caught up in the adventure-bike boom, but my Romaniacs story had actually started 10 years earlier. And it started with me getting absolutely humbled.
In 2016, I’d just come off my best result at the Erzbergrodeo, finishing 29th outright, and thought it was the perfect time to have a crack at Romaniacs. Rather than easing myself into it, I did what seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and entered Gold class on a KTM 300 EXC. Looking back, it was a stupid decision. I completely underestimated just how difficult Romaniacs Gold was. Erzberg was hard, but Romaniacs was harder, longer and crazier than anything I’d expected, and my first attempt lasted until Day 1, when I broke my arm and went home with my tail between my legs.
EATING HUMBLE PIE
That first attempt taught me a lesson. If I genuinely wanted to race Gold one day, I needed to stop thinking I could just turn up and do it. I returned in 2018 and entered Silver on a KTM 450 EXC, with the idea being to gain experience, understand the race and use Silver as a stepping stone towards eventually achieving the goal of racing Gold properly.
It worked. I finished third in the Prologue and inside the top 10 outright, despite nearly losing one of my eyes in the process. These overseas hard enduro events are bloody crazy, but racing Silver showed me what I needed to do if I wanted to compete in Gold. So I returned to Australia and went to work.
THE GOLD DREAM
Fast-forward to 2024 and a fair bit of life had happened. I’d been through two shoulder reconstructions, my wife Christine and I had welcomed our daughter after a long IVF battle to become parents, and I’d done a heap more hard enduro racing in Australia. I won the Capricorn Extreme outright and finished second in the championship, and eventually decided it was time. I was going to give myself one full year and commit 110 per cent to racing Gold at Romaniacs.
I knew I wasn't getting any younger. Gold class is absolutely brutal and I could feel the window beginning to close, but more than anything, I didn't want to be sitting there 10 years later asking myself, What if? So I lived on the bike. I trained and trained and trained, and by the time I got to Romania, I was the fittest I'd ever been and I knew I'd done everything possible to prepare myself.
Then, two days before the race, everything disappeared in a split second.
GONE BABY, GONE
I had a small, low-speed practice crash and landed on my already reconstructed right shoulder. Instantly, I could hardly move my arm. I was devastated. A full year of training, discipline and sacrifice and suddenly the Gold-class dream was gone.
I loaded myself up on painkillers, dropped back to Silver and somehow finished the race pretty much one-handed. Crossing that finish line gave me a lot of time to think about what had happened and, mentally, I closed that chapter of my life. Of course I was disappointed, but there was also some satisfaction because if I asked myself that “What if?” question in 10 years, I knew the answer. I'd given it everything I had and more.
The result hadn't worked out, but the discipline and commitment required to even try competing at that level was something I could live with. I thought Romaniacs and I were done. Then they announced the Adventure classes.
A SECOND CHANCE
A few weeks later I was back home with a very second-hand shoulder when I saw the announcement. Red Bull Romaniacs was introducing an Adventure class. My eyes lit up and my brain immediately went into overdrive. This was me!
Some of the most fun I've ever had on a motorcycle was riding my 2007 KTM 950 Super Enduro. I loved big adventure bikes, I had all this hard enduro experience and suddenly Romaniacs had created a category that combined the two. Could all the training, injuries and setbacks have somehow led me towards racing adventure bikes instead? Who knew? But that was all I needed. I was hooked.
BUILDING AN 890
For 2025, I went all-in. I developed two 2022 KTM 890 Adventure Rs. One remained stock while the other became my dedicated development bike for Romaniacs. I raced it in every type of event and condition I could find, developing both the motorcycle and myself for what I knew would be a gruelling event. Eventually, I had an unreal race bike.
Because 2025 was the first year for the twin-cylinder Adventure class, hiring something suitable in Romania was almost impossible. So I sent my own bike over. Bike sorted. Training sorted. Romaniacs Adventure debut finally happening. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, apparently.
IT HAPPENED, AGAIN.
Two days before I was due to fly out, with my 890 already sitting at the dealership in Romania, I headed out for one final training ride. It was a typical cold, wet Melbourne day and, in hindsight, I shouldn't have been riding. I decided to practise some hillclimbs, didn't make the first one, aborted the attempt and started walking the roughly 200kg wet adventure bike back down the hill to somewhere safe enough to remount.
Then I slipped. I landed directly on a small cut-off tree stump with the 890 coming down with me and the pain was instant. I'd broken my tailbone. I had an X-ray the next day and there it was – I couldn't comfortably sit down, let alone race an adventure bike for five days at Red Bull Romaniacs.
My 2025 race was over before it had even begun. Again. I transferred the flights, moved my entry and started arranging to get my bike home from Romania. A broken tailbone is also notoriously slow to heal, so there wasn't even the consolation of immediately jumping back on the bike. Eventually I healed, and then I started training for 2026.
ONE MORE GO
For 2026, I changed the plan. Rather than shipping my complete motorcycle halfway around the world again, I arranged to hire a 2025 KTM 890 Adventure R from Profi Moto Shop in Romania. Paul and his team were great to deal with and it seemed like the much easier solution. Back home, I'd bought Daniel Milner's 2024/2025 KTM 890 Rally bike and worked out how to build it into essentially the same specification as my proven 2022 race bike.
Two years' worth of development parts went into a box. That box contained basically everything. The frame and engine were about the only major parts of the hire bike I planned to retain, with the rest being my suspension, protection and all the pieces I'd developed over two years of racing the 890 at home. I sent the box to Romania and was told it would be waiting when I arrived in Sibiu.
Compared with sending a complete motorcycle overseas, this was going to be easy. Right? Wrong.
JUST ARRIVE HEALTHY
The biggest thing I wanted to do differently in 2026 was arrive healthy. Physically and mentally, I had never felt this prepared for a race. I'd learned the bike inside-out, knew what my body could handle and had proven the package through racing back home. After everything that had happened in 2024 and 2025, I wasn't going to destroy another Romaniacs campaign with some last-minute training accident.
The plan was almost boringly simple: fly over a week early, bolt my proven parts onto the hire bike, test it, get some rest and give the race my best shot. For once, I had actually made it to Romania healthy and uninjured. Then I arrived at the KTM dealership.
WHERE'S MY BLOODY BOX?
I landed in Bucharest on Monday afternoon and drove five hours to Sibiu. On Tuesday morning, I walked into the dealership ready to start building the bike. There was a problem. My box was stuck in customs.
My heart stopped. It took five days of endless messages and phone calls to finally understand what had happened. The parts had been sent under a temporary import, but the receiving dealer had completed the paperwork as a permanent import. Customs saw the discrepancy and everything stopped.
I now had three options. Race a completely stock hire KTM 890 Adventure R in the hardest enduro in the world while being financially responsible for any damage, drop into one of the lower Adventure classes and still race the stock bike, or go home. None sounded particularly appealing.
I'M GOING HOME
By Thursday, I'd tried everything. Even if the box suddenly appeared, I estimated it would take at least 16 hours to strip the hire bike and rebuild it. Sign-on consumed Saturday, the Prologue track walk was Sunday and racing was about to begin. I still needed to build the bike, test it and somehow recover enough to race five days against some of the best riders in the world.
My smartwatch was already telling me I was overreaching and I hadn't even ridden the bloody motorcycle. I checked the flights and there was one back to Melbourne the next morning. I rang Christine and told her I was coming home.
While packing, though, I started thinking about how long it had taken to reach this point healthy. I'm not someone who enjoys asking for help, but for some reason I pulled out my phone, recorded a video explaining what had happened and posted it without even watching it back. Then my phone exploded.
THE INTERNET TO THE RESCUE
The response was unbelievable. Between my video and another from the World Hard Enduro Podcast, people started sharing the story and suddenly offers of help were coming from everywhere. KTM Australia and KTM Austria called and offered assistance, no questions asked. Logistics experts started chasing the box, people offered motorcycles and parts, other racers offered factory suspension and one good mate even offered to pay for an enduro bike so I could still race.
It was overwhelming. Forty-eight hours earlier I'd been preparing to fly home, but then, at lunchtime on Saturday, the box arrived. There were also some additional parts from the KTM factory race team. I finally had everything in my hands and now all that stood between me and the Adventure Ultimate class at Red Bull Romaniacs was roughly 16 hours of hard labour.
By Sunday afternoon, the 890 was finally together. I was exhausted. I headed to the designated practice area and discovered it was the same place where I'd destroyed my shoulder before the 2024 race. Perfect.
TEN YEARS LATER
Looking back, the journey didn't begin when I landed in Bucharest. It didn't begin when I bought the 890, when Romaniacs announced the Adventure classes or even when I started building a big twin-cylinder bike capable of surviving one of the hardest events on earth. It started in 2016.
It started with a KTM 300 EXC, too much confidence and a broken arm on Day 1. From there came Silver, Gold ambitions, two reconstructed shoulders, becoming a dad, a year spent training harder than I ever had before, another destroyed shoulder, a broken tailbone, two years developing an adventure bike and a box of parts stuck in Romanian customs. There were plenty of opportunities to decide I'd had enough.
In fact, I'd already decided that once. When I crossed the finish line in 2024, I genuinely thought I'd closed the Romaniacs chapter of my life. Instead, the Adventure class opened another one. Ten years after Romaniacs first kicked my arse, I was finally sitting on the start line once more.
How’d he go?
Rob finished 6th in class. You can read all about his heroics in the previous issue of ADB #564.