With pootling along in the Atom class sounding less fun without his young charge , he decided to turn things up a notch and reentered himself in the Silver Class . While one of the country ’ s best riders and a former Romaniacs champion to boot , Chris isn ’ t shy about how much the game has changed since his last competitive outing in Romania in 2015 . “ There is such a huge gap between the Gold and Silver classes now ,” Chris says . “ To ride in Gold now I would need to take , like , six months to get ready for a sort of thing like that . It needs to be a real solid effort and I just don ’ t have that time available to me . “ Gold has to be really really difficult because it ’ s part of the FIM Hard Enduro World Championship . A good way to show the difference is with this famous hillclimb called Long Walk Up . The first time they put it in it took , I think , about an hour and a half to get up and only two of us actually managed to get up it . The rest of the field couldn ’ t get up and ended up taking a penalty to go around it . This year , the Gold Class went up and the top time was six and a half minutes . “ The current generation of riders coming through have worked their whole lives towards
being a hard enduro rider . It ’ s not something they kind of do ‘ as well as ’, it ’ s what they ’ re all about . That changes everything , but then again , you ’ ve still got Graham Jarvis making them all look stupid .” A huge part of how the Gold Class riders have become so good has been tyre development , Chris explains . “ There was one big long river section I remember from racing Gold , that ’ s now in Silver . You could only just get up it , like you were riding on a step ladder and only able to move metres at a time , dragging and lifting our asses up there with the old tyres . With the modern tyres , you can stop , regain your balance , let the clutch out and just get going again and ride straight up .”
KIWI RIDER 55