2025 FIM World Hard Enduro Championship round one, Valleys Hard Enduro, saw the Mani Lettenbichler pick-up where he left off with the win but Enduro21 found plenty to talk about as the series bounced back from oblivion, free from KTM shackles.

Now the dust has literally settled on the 2025 FIM Hard Enduro World Championship opening round at Valleys Hard Enduro, Wales, there are lots of talking points. Like how the first race of the new era fits in context of all of the highs of the original WESS championship, then the FIM series as it became and ultimately the lows of recent months. 

We’ll talk KTM’s involvement, why the new season is a chance to wipe the slate clean, which surprising name was in the hat for the job of championship promoter and why was Graham Jarvis riding a KTM? 

Fresh start 

The FIM officially announced new promoters for the Hard Enduro World Championship on April 24, just two weeks before the first round of the hastily rescheduled season. 

Admitting it was all a bit too close for the first round, and with a phrase "let’s just get through this one" banded about often during the weekend, there was a sense of starting afresh at Valleys Hard Enduro which was hard to avoid.

The new normal for the HEWC is a far cry from the heady days of the opening WESS round in 2018. Amid a lot of noise from the then new promoters, WESS Gmbh, through their embedded media partners and influencing parties KTM and Red Bull, the 2018 Extreme XL Lagares was a spectacle to say the least.  

Remember those days? A full factory KTM and Husqvarna line-up of European and US riders like Taddy Blazusiak, Josep Garcia, Cody Webb, Colton Haaker and Graham Jarvis...and that wasn’t the full squad.

We’ve come a long way baby

Winner of that first WESS race was a young gentleman called Billy Bolt, taking his first major hard enduro victory. Jonny Walker finished second with Mani Lettenbichler also claiming his first major race podium in third. 

There’s no escaping the fact that level of hype we used to find at Lagares has long since departed. The new reality is the first round of the 2025 Hard Enduro World Championship was a vastly lower-key affair. 

A lot of water has passed under the Porto bridge since then and not least the size of the KTM and Husqvarna race teams – although those guys on that original WESS podium seem to be doing OK.  

The Valleys results are here BTW: 2025 Hard Enduro Enduro World Championship: Lettenbichler Dominates Dusty Opener at Valleys Hard Enduro

Breaking the stigma

One big positive for the new race director, Ross Whitehead, and his new beginning is being able to stand apart from those controlling influences, and the stigma, of KTM. 

A long-standing noose around the WESS and subsequent HEWC neck was the association with the Austrian manufacturer. 

The fact it was a championship run by KTM to promote its riders in the first place was something which the former series promoters could never get rid of – like Lady Macbeth trying to wash her hands of Duncan’s blood.

When WESS transitioned into an official FIM Hard Enduro World Championship in 2021 it brought new teams into the series, Sherco for example who had not previously contested the full championship. 

That helped but some manufacturers were always cynical of their Austrian rivals holding purse strings for the world championship and continue not to officially take part. 

Imagine if some of the Italian-based manufacturers could be persuaded to get off their backsides and commit with official riders and teams. TM, Fantic…why not?

Sherco’s committment has not been without controversy with notable riders vocal about how they feel not having an orange bike, or a Red Bull helmet, seemingly affects your result.

Time to wipe the slate clean?

Whether you feel the criticisms are based in reality, or inflamed by social media, the new start for the Hard Enduro World Championship is a chance to wipe that slate clean. 

The idea of growing the sport, attracting bigger numbers from more international riders in a championship where only KTM or Husqvarna riders are winning has been a huge hurdle.

WESS has gone and with it the stigma of the KTM pulling the purse strings and that has to be the positive for the new promotors, ProTouchGlobal.

While the feeling seems to be of rebooting the world championship from a bottom up again, the reality is it needs doing and it’ll potentially run more freely without that hurdle in the way.

Four-strokes and new manufacturers coming? 

What might help the series grow is if the strong rumour of a four-stroke class comes to fruition. It would boost the groundswell, make it more interesting, bring more riders and hopefully manufacturers into hard enduro. 

Triumph Racing might not be too keen for Jonny Walker to do too much extreme riding but bringing a new rider just for this series would promote their new bikes on the world stage without question.

So too would bringing back the Junior World Cup, to ensure the next generation of riders like the Brightmore brothers, now in the X-Grip Racing team, have a place to learn the craft. 

Add to that some fresh green Kawasaki’s arriving in the near future (details are sketchy but if someone doesn’t take one to hard enduros we’ll eat our hats). And add the Blu Cru in the mix with Cody Webb promoting Yamaha in our sport and racing Silver Kings which is HEWC round two on June 12-14.

Valleys Hard Enduro version 2.0

Having jumped the FIM and WESS hurdles in 2024, his first attempt, Valleys Hard Enduro Race Director Nick Plumb says he wanted to build on that and wasn’t ready to quit. So when the new promoters were making plans Nick says he was always keen to be back in the calendar, despite it being just a couple of weeks lead time.

Plumb had signed up for three years of the HEWC and always had the ambition to do the job he’d set out to do and basically give himself, his team and his event a fair crack of the world championship whip.

How did it go then? 

The event itself surely moved on from last year and though the blazing hot weather again caused massive dust problems, the course itself was better planned, allowed the riders to get their flow going more, overtake and when you analyse their speed and lap times, the results seem fair from where we stood.

Criticisms from riders chiefly included the knockout-style qualification process and the severity of main event.

The knockout races saw 48 riders go through heats, whittling everyone down in to packs of 12 riders which would be the start order in rows for Sunday. It sort of worked but the dust was horrendous and dangerous to race in frankly, despite the big efforts to water the course.

Make a good start and life was good. Make a bad start and it was risky chaos. For riders in a world championship they don’t need that much risk in qualification and Billy got away with a crash which could have been a lot worse. 

It worked out really badly for Mitch Brightmore too who derailed a chain in his first heat, DNFd and consequently had to start from row four, minutes behind his rivals. 

Not hard enough?

Organisers have a thankless task designing a course to suit the riders and the dry weather, the same as Valleys 2024, made it much easier for the fastest riders like Mani, Billy, Teo and Mario to cover the ground at their unreal speeds.

Laps one and two of the four lap race were easier, with laps three and four introducing tougher sections. This is a well-established tactic from organisers and helps spread the field out by not throwing them into tough sections on the first lap which cause bottlenecks.

A few riders complained it wasn’t hard enough, and we get that, but it is difficult to see what difference it would have made in reality.

Plus it is well worth noting how different things could have been if it had been wetter. Or as damp as it normally is under those trees. Rain is always a possibility in Wales but that’s two years in a row where it has actually been hotter than Spain. 

Graham Jarvis as world championship promoter? It could have happened...

Quite high on the list of "stuff we didn’t know" list at the weekend was the knowledge of the other candidates on the roll call of potential promoters for the world championship.

Those included a certain Graham Jarvis who explained he’d hoped his experience and knowledge of the sport would stand him in a good position to spearhead this fresh start. 

Completing the forms, Graham said he sent everything off to the FIM but never heard anything back. Maybe the FIM thought he doesn’t have enough experience yet? Best keep riding Graham. 

Graham rides a KTM

We don’t want to look like a Jarvis fanzine but did you spot Graham was on a KTM? A late decision to race the Valleys meant his bikes were elsewhere and he enlisted the help of Rutherford Racing in the UK to build his bike and do the prep (which included some late nights building engines we understand).

What you may not have spotted was the bike under Graham’s sponsors logos had a PDS system not a linkage for a change. Graham finished seventh on his KTM debut.

People were asking are the lights turned on? 

As we already said, the fresh start for the HEWC came as a big announcement from the FIM just a couple of weeks ahead of this first round in Wales. 

But where was the promotion for the series from the new promoters and the FIM? Where were the press releases, the news and the video highlights? 

We’re not ignoring the Valleys content but remove riders and teams’ Instagram and Facebook accounts from the ionosphere and how would you know this FIM World Championship was actually happening? 

It’s something the new promoters have to address if they want to build it back up again, simply because the race failed to make much of a noise outside the small world hard enduro occupies (small in terms of the wider sporting news and media landescape). 

The topical examples which prove the point here are Erzberg and Romaniacs who work hard to promote themselves. Now those two entities are stand alone event (or stand together possibly?), the Hard Enduro World Championship also needs to work hard promote itself to a wider audience.

For our money they should be shouting from the roof tops that they have cut free the shackles of KTM and that this is a new beginning.

Given more time, more of a plan, more budget (no doubt) and the next event being part of the US Hard Enduro series, things different again at round two, Silver Kings Hard Enduro in June. 

That might just be the longest and most considered Enduro21 Notebook we’ve ever written. If you got this far, well done!

Photo Credit: Future7Media