Proof that they come way crazier than me, here's the Tenere 700 competing in this year's Numb Bum endurance ice race!

 

 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uReU00gPk48

 

 

 

🤣 I see it has proper tire guards on it as well. Lol

8 minutes ago, Kingsize said:

🤣 I see it has proper tire guards on it as well. Lol

A few years ago a racer died because of being torn up by an exposed tire, so these are required equipment on all the competing bikes now.  

Yes sir! I've seen them on the TW forums as well. They for sure do their intention. 

crazy shet!

Sure you need the sheepskin to keep your balls warm...😄

Nice meeting you out there on the ice @Wintersdark.  What a crazy race.  The day started out at plus 7 degrees Celsius with the wind blowing at about 25 km per hr.  Then the temperature dropped and the snow started about when the race started.  It's now -17 c. at 4 am. here on Sunday.  It started at 1 pm on Saturday and will continue for 24 hours straight as it's an endurance race.  The winner is the bike/team that completes the most laps.  I'll post up some video as soon as I can.

A small video of the ice race.  I don't know how to imbed it so it looks like @Wintersdarkvid.  

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4khYv-ywLqQ

18 minutes ago, Landshark said:

A small video of the ice race.  I don't know how to imbed it so it looks like @Wintersdarkvid.  

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4khYv-ywLqQ

For some reason YouTube doesn't allow embedding on this particular video, maybe it's not set as public or another setting.
Normally when you paste a link from YouTube and push "enter" it automatically embeds.

37 minutes ago, Ray Ride4life said:

For some reason YouTube doesn't allow embedding on this particular video, maybe it's not set as public or another setting.
Normally when you paste a link from YouTube and push "enter" it automatically embeds.

It is set to public but maybe I'll go in and check the settings again.

Yeah, that was something else for sure.  I can only imagine how exhausting that must be, particularly at 4am!  Crazy bastards!

That's really cool. Thanks for the video share. 

Super Cool! Awesome Vids. Brings back great memories.

 

I remember when I did my first Numb Bum in 1988 on George Lake, near Fairview, AB. When XR600's were king. There was everything in the open class from an ATC 250R powered RM250 chassis to a mint '86 GSXR1100. Rules...bike had to have a tether, lights (including brake lights) and be mechanically sound.

We won that year with absolutely NO problems. The next year it was super cold - minus 30ish C and we fought hard for second with 9 tire repairs, a broken chain then subsequently a stator housing. Brutal year. Got passed at night on the back straight by this WAILING GSXR doing what seemed like double our speed, only to find him about 200 feet past the corner out in the snow.

The final year we competed we won the open class again with Evil Knievel as our Grand Marshal. Contested an RZ350 powered KX125 in the under 600 class, until the throttles stuck wide open going into a hairpin...stuffed it so hard into a snowbank it took us an hour to get it out! That bike was QUICK! but who ever thought about heated carbs?? Had some great times back when I was young and stupid! Now I'm just old and stupid, and don't like being cold...

A bit of background - having just started moving over to the adventure world from woods racing and previously racing the numb bum on a dedicated ice bike this year was more about the challenge. A buddy and myself decided to run it solo and see how many cumulative hrs we could put down. Him on an AT and myself on the T7. 

 

First off - Adventure bikes are not the best tool for the job... being 5'5" and 150lbs this is a lot of bike. Aside from the weight the biggest issue I found was shifting over on the seat in the corners to get ontop of the bike was more of a chore than it needed to be. Studs held up great until the last few laps when I started to get a little hard on the throttle out of the corners and it didn't take long for them all too disappear.

 

I was personally shooting for 16 hrs of cumulative riding and ended up with just over 16.5 hrs riding 810km [78L of fuel], longest break was 2 hrs where I slept for most of that between 3:30am-5:30am.

Kyle on the AT ended up with 18.25hrs of cumulative riding [885km], longest break was a 4hr sleep from 6am to 10am. My longest ride nonstop was 6 laps / 2.1 hrs / 90km; his longest ride nonstop was 11 laps / 3.56hrs / 165km. Basically ran steady minus fuel/food breaks for the first 17hrs then slept for 4 hrs.

 

The course its self is tight and gets extremely rough [I would compare it to riding some of the tightest turns on the Alberta Hwy 40 - forestry trunk road with heavy heavy mid august wash board and that same section on a continuous loop for 24 hrs].

With the weather going from +6c with flood water to -21c, I could have done a lot better with the gear I brought. I was running Gears heated gloves/jacket/insoles. ended up with some burns on my hands from the gloves [they do say to wear another set of gloves underneath... the jacket was 100% great and the insoles in moto boots can only keep up till -15 then it gets just painfully cold.

 

Bike: T7 really is an animal and I was getting close to lap times I would have put down on a moto bike when pushing hard, it performed flawlessly minus two issues [1. There was a period of time that it would only start in neutral and 2. My last minute home made wheel guards needed to be reweld mid race after washing out pretty hard in a corner]

 

Mods/addons for the numb bum:

Shaved stock seat w/ sheep skin cover [was actually quite nice] - still waiting for that seat concepts..

Flexx handlebars: cut down alot of damping in the bars; only downside is the price

Rekluse semi auto clutch: I am a huge fan of the rekluse clutches on 4 strokes due to never "flaming" out in the corners + with lingering left wrist issues this cuts down on my fatigue huge, the only downside I ever have with them is the cost. Previously I had only run them on 450's so I wasn't sure how it would be in the T7, there was no clutch whining/slipping; performed 100%.

Cyclops lights: didn't miss a beat, no flickering or diming

2 wheel dynoworks: no benefit to the ice as I couldn't put the power to the ground with the studs. but there  was no ZERO hesitation in the motor and consistently rev'd from idle to the limiter

Wheels: ended up relacing the rear rim to a 2.15" excel rim last minute to fit the ice tire better [was hoping to find a 2.5" but no luck], this required drilling out the holes slightly and cutting a bit of length off the spokes. Rim locks were added to the front and rear. [I am excited to run cheaper DOT nobbies on this rim in the summer]

Exhaust: Camel high muffler paired with a Leovince no-cat stainless header [no mods required, paired quite well only thing being the flange was about a mill to big on the muffler side]. No real damage and I am happy to be over with the stock muffler rubbing through the swing arm.

 

All in all - this was very challenging but had a lot of fun and makes all other day to day "issues" seem pretty petty in comparison to the struggles encountered during a 24hr numb bum let alone on a big bike. If your ever in Canada during the month of February I would highly encourage checking this race out. 

 

***Graph shows myself [All Work] T7 / Kyle [Fun Farm] AT / Kevin [Dirt bag Express (KTM 250cc running daylight only as a comparison)]***

Edited February 22, 20223 yr by DBen.989

Very Impressive. Thanks for joining and posting!!!

You are a legend sir! I know how hard it is to do that race on a prepped race bike (albeit an XR600), let alone a basically stock T7, AND doing it SOLO! My hat's off to you. Would like to catch up sometime and swap stories.

18 minutes ago, DBen.989 said:

First off - Adventure bikes are not the best tool for the job... being 5'5" and 150lbs this is a lot of bike. Aside from the weight the biggest issue I found was shifting over on the seat in the corners to get ontop of the bike was more of a chore than it needed to be. Studs held up great until the last few laps when I started to get a little hard on the throttle out of the corners and it didn't take long for them all too disappear.

 

I was personally shooting for 16 hrs of cumulative riding and ended up with just over 16.5 hrs riding 810km [78L of fuel], longest break was 2 hrs where I slept for most of that between 3:30am-5:30am.

Kyle on the AT ended up with 18.25hrs of cumulative riding [885km], longest break was a 4hr sleep from 6am to 10am. My longest ride nonstop was 6 laps / 2.1 hrs / 90km; his longest ride nonstop was 11 laps / 3.56hrs / 165km. Basically ran steady minus fuel/food breaks for the first 17hrs then slept for 4 hrs.

 

The course its self is tight and gets extremely rough [I would compare it to riding some of the tightest turns on the Alberta Hwy 40 - forestry trunk road with heavy heavy mid august wash board and that same section on a continuous loop for 24 hrs].

With the weather going from +6c with flood water to -21c, I could have done a lot better with the gear I brought. I was running Gears heated gloves/jacket/insoles. ended up with some burns on my hands from the gloves [they do say to wear another set of gloves underneath... the jacket was 100% great and the insoles in moto boots can only keep up till -15 then it gets just painfully cold.

 

Bike: T7 really is an animal and I was getting close to lap times I would have put down on a moto bike, it performed flawlessly minus two issues [1. There was a period of time that it would only start in neutral and 2. My last minute home made wheel guards needed to be reweld mid race after washing out pretty hard in a corner]

 

Mods/addons for the numb bum:

Shaved stock seat w/ sheep skin cover [was actually quite nice] - still waiting for that seat concepts..

Flexx handlebars: cut down alot of damping in the bars; only downside is the price

Rekluse semi auto clutch: I am a huge fan of the rekluse clutches on 4 strokes due to never "flaming" out in the corners + with lingering left wrist issues this cuts down on my fatigue huge, the only downside I ever have with them is the cost. Previously I had only run them on 450's so I wasn't sure how it would be in the T7, there was no clutch whining/slipping; performed 100%.

Cyclops lights: didn't miss a beat, no flickering or diming

2 wheel dynoworks: no benefit to the ice as I couldn't put the power to the ground with the studs. but there  was no ZERO hesitation in the motor and consistently rev'd from idle to the limiter

Wheels: ended up relacing the rear rim to a 2.15" excel rim last minute to fit the ice tire better [was hoping to find a 2.5" but no luck], this required drilling out the holes slightly and cutting a bit of length off the spokes. Rim locks were added to the front and rear. [I am excited to run cheaper DOT nobbies on this rim in the summer]

Exhaust: Camel high muffler paired with a Leovince no-cat stainless header [no mods required, paired quite well only thing being the flange was about a mill to big on the muffler side]. No real damage and I am happy to be over with the stock muffler rubbing through the swing arm.

 

All in all - this was very challenging but had a lot of fun and makes all other day to day "issues" seem pretty petty in comparison to the struggles encountered during a 24hr numb bum let alone on a big bike. If your ever in Canada during the month of February I would highly encourage checking this race out. 

 

***Graph shows myself [All Work] T7 / Kyle [Fun Farm] AT / Kevin [Dirt bag Express (KTM 250cc running daylight only as a comparison)]***

 

Amazing! Thanks for popping in and sharing.

I couldn't or wouldn't do it.  Congratulations for finishing for that matter.  Great first post.  Hopefully see you out for a ride maybe.