Last weekend (august 7th and 8th) a bunch of SRAMmies took part in the 24H downhill race held at the Semmering Bike Park in Austria.
We decided to give a go at this crazy idea of racing downhill around the clock under the team name "Bottom Out Hard powered by SRAM", with our team featuring an ecletic mix of german downhill talent, fast DSD technicians and a couple of marketing guys thrown in for a laugh. The goal was simple: to ride as many runs as possible on the track for 24 hours. The team with more runs won.
Of course a big part of the fun was the roadtrip itself, where we had plenty of time to enjoy the rain on the german and austrian highways and lots of healthy food, perfect for athletes like us!
This is pretty much all we saw for the seven hours drive from Schweinfurt to Semmering: rain and traffic jams.
Of course we got to the venue super late and had to setup our HUGE pit area in the middle of the night. At least we were under a starry sky...but not for long!
In fact on saturday morning, as soon as we were getting ready for a couple of practice run, it started to rain. This turned the Le Mans style start, with over 150 riders scrambling for their bikes on a wet grassy field, into a slip'n'slide festival! Here our starter Josch Hein tackles his bike - litterally!
The mass start meant one thing: 150 riders trying to squeeze into the first corner, moto-style. Carnage ensued.
The top half of the course was cut entirely on ski slopes and consisted of widely taped, off-camber grassy corners. Here Josch tests the limit of his tires on the second lap.
But he got it right the next lap...and the next one...and again: in the end Josch clocked the fastest laps amongst all 400 racers, and put in something like 35 runs for our team. Good job!
The track wasn't really hard, but the super fast lift meant you were clocking a 3 and half minute run every 5 minutes. With the rain, mud and cold, it was easy to get exhausted quickly. Our team mate Andre didn't really care, and kept riding well into the night, when some guys (err...) gave it up to catch a bit of sleep.
This was approximately halfway through the race. Deep ruts had formed, the rain eased up, and the track was super fun to ride.
The only downside was that the "free pasta" provided by the organizer turned out to be an overcooked mess with some dodgy sauces...thankfully Phillipp a.k.a. Fluffy had brought his coffe machine and pumped out cappuccinos and lattes for us all!
Damp. Cold. Misty. Fun.
In the end we did quite well, placing 4th amongst over 20 teams of 6 people, just two runs behind the winning team! A big part of this results is thanks to Maurice (left, with the green beanie), our 7th team member. He was too young to race, so he came over anyways to help manage the transponder changes and hand us clean gloves and goggles at the lift. He NEVER slept for the whole 24 hours and managed to always keep a rider on track, well done! We ended up doing 150 runs with a total running time of 9 hours, 36 minutes and 53 seconds!
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