The Vintagent Selects: The Mountain Rally

Each year the Mountain Rally attracts custom, classic and rare motorcycles/riders from around the world, who throw themselves into the Mountain Rally challenge. This year saw highly custom Harley-Davidson Pan America and other new and old classic Harleys, custom Royal Enfield 650’s, Norton Commandos, custom 1980’s Dakar BMW’s and many stock Triumph Scramblers, BMW R9T’s etc. Each road rally stage is approximately 300-350km per day, with 5 Rally checkpoints in each stage and Marshalls timing. Being a road rally, speed limits must not be broken, The Malle Marshall team know the precise timings and for each minute early or late the rally teams lose a point, meaning a winning team at the end of each stage and an overall winning team.

350km a day on a custom motorcycle may seem straight forward. But throw in the highest roads in the highest mountains in Europe into the mix. With unpredictable mountain weather, where skies can turn black in minutes and warm valleys soon turn from 37C to 5C at the highest passes of 2770m. The Mountain Rally soon becomes an endurance adventure, where the teams main focus is to complete the stage, look after their team mates (some of which only met for the first time at the start-line in Austria) and enjoy the greatest motorcycle riding in Europe, arguably, in the world.