I’ve had the same conversation with myself every July for the last six years: “This is the year I fly out to Sibiu and watch Romaniacs in person.” Then the credit card statement from last year’s “definitely doing this” trip shows up, my wife reminds me the kid has soccer through August, and I end up watching it on a laptop propped on the workbench while pretending to service a chain that’s been fine since spring. Anyway. The 23rd Red Bull Romaniacs kicks off on 28 July and runs through 1 August in Sibiu, Romania, and this year’s “Unstoppable” edition has enough going on that I’m already rehearsing the excuse for why I’m not there.

The favourite, one win from history

Mani Lettenbichler arrives as the man to beat. The KTM rider currently leads the Hard Enduro World Ranking and has won Romaniacs six times – one more victory ties him with Graham Jarvis for the all-time record at this event. Behind him on the ranking sit Trystan Hart, Mario Roman, Mitch Brightmore, and Teo Kabakchiev, with Billy Bolt (Husqvarna), Alfredo Gomez, and Wade Young rounding out a start list that reads like the entire hard enduro world championship decided to show up at once. Fifty-eight countries are sending competitors this year, which for an event that’s essentially “ride a motorcycle up a mountain of loose rock for a week” is a genuinely wild number.

Jarvis goes electric, in the class that matters

Here’s the story I keep coming back to: Graham Jarvis – seven-time Romaniacs champion and the man Lettenbichler is chasing in the record books – is lining up in Gold Class, the top tier, on a fully electric bike. His custom Jarv-E, built with engineer David Freidinger, reportedly puts out 67 hp from a 5.6 kWh pack at around 95 kg dry, enough to get up the kind of 45-degree rock faces that make Romaniacs Romaniacs. Nobody has raced an electric bike in Gold Class before. Whatever it does in the results sheet, it’s the first real data point on whether battery power belongs at the sharp end of hard enduro instead of just at the demo-lap stage. Remy Gardner – yes, the 2021 Moto2 world champion, now racing WorldSBK – makes his hard enduro debut the same week, in Silver Class, which is its own kind of “how hard can this actually be” experiment.

Competitors tackling a rock section at Red Bull Romaniacs

What’s new for “Unstoppable”

The organisers have reshuffled the route for 2026: instead of basing everything out of Sibiu, riders get two overnight stays away from the city, out in the Jiu Valley’s old mining country around Petrila and Lupeni. There’s also a new “Core” tier added to the Adventure Bike class, sitting between the existing Ultimate and Lite grades – presumably for the growing pile of us who bought a big ADV bike, took one green-lane course, and decided we were now qualified to attempt something adjacent to Romaniacs. (I am not qualified. I looked at the entry requirements. I closed the tab.)

Racing runs 28 July through 1 August, with the Prologue and qualifying stages first before the week builds toward the Hare Scramble finale that decides who actually gets to call themselves a Romaniacs finisher. If you’re near Sibiu, or just have a laptop and low standards for what counts as a Tuesday night in, it’s worth clearing the week for. I’ll be doing the second thing. I always do.

Photos: Red Bull Content Pool, via redbullromaniacs.com