I got a friend request just the other day. Spending as much time as I do on the keyboard, and on social media, that should come as no great surprise.
However, this requestee was lacking certain physical attributes, had far more clothing on than I was expecting in their profile pic and was not promising me things that most 'normal' wouldn't deliver.
Because the name was vaguely familiar, I dived into the FB Profile. We had a few common friends in the hard enduro scene, but it appeared to me that his account had been recently hijacked.
Not knowing whether I was talking to a fellow HE fiend or some foreign hack, I asked the following:
"Bud, if you are a legit Hard Enduriac then when is the first W.A Hard Enduro Series round and what brand is the latest WHES raffle bike?"
In short order he came back with "#$%$# I haven't paid attention... ha ha".
From this typically WHES response, I knew I was talking to the real Adam Ellis - affectionately known in the ranks as Backpack.
Nick names are hard earned in hard enduro and Ellis certainly earned his.
On his first ever hard enduro race he was carrying a backpack full of spare tubes, tools and 3L of water around a Super Enduro circuit that was a paltry 1.1 km long. At its furthest, Adam would never have been more than 400m from the pits! A backpack in that paddock was more than just a little redundant, but he'd never ridden the bike without it.
Superstition had the better of him, but it paid dividends. He won his category in spite of the excess baggage.
Henceforth, he was known as Backpack.
But this story is not about the rider - it is about the abhorrence that was his bike and how this bike was pivotal in proving the paradigm that you don't have to spend a million bucks in hard enduro to have a fully fat time.
Backpack's 2004 Gas Gas ec300 was born into hard enduro after it was wrapped around a tree at 80km an hour by a buddy of his.
"With all the flexibility of a ballerina, Drew bent its back end around itself and earned himself a broken sternum, ribs and collarbone for his efforts".
You need to image Victor Frankenstein and some dimly lit work in the back shed to conceive or how this bike was ever possibly going to roll into a race paddock. To get us there, I'll let Backpack tell the story:
"The bike owed me around $1800 after years of destruction and reconstruction! It was a dinosaur compared to anything else on the grid during the 2022 WHES season"
"So....... I purchased the bike for $1200 from a couple Estonian blokes that had beat the hell out of it. The subframe was cracked in half and the seat was cable tied on. Anything that was alloy was bent: the pegs, the bars.
I actually really wanted to buy it just for the motor. I wanted it as spare for my 2011 Gasser.
But the bike actually had better bones and running capacity than I thought. So, I just couldn’t help but build it back to a functioning unit. It cleaned and tuned up well and rode well too.
My partner really wanted a larger 2 stroke bike, so I crudely and quickly dropped the suspension and set it up for enduro. After only about six months into its enduro life, Drew Williams, who had politely offered to return it to Park Ferme for us, came very unstuck whilst trying to set lap records around the special test stage. He wrapped the bike around a tree."
"And so it sat....for a long while....before I decided to rebuild the subframe from 19mm steel tubing. Poaching a few hand me downs from the '11 bike, I slapped it back together and rode it for a while until I finished its first round of destruction, cartwheeling it over a log."
Suddenly and inconveniently, the first official W.A. Hard Enduro Series became a reality and the race was on to create a hard enduro pig that that Adam could compete on!!
The tear down began and just about every exterior component was replaced.
He used a heap of 2011 spares to make all the old plastics fit the new frame, which he'd given a fresh coat of black paint. Four Great Northern tinnies were used on each fork to shim the upper triple clamp into tolerance.
No new bits were indulged for this beast. Instead, thrown at it was a 2018 Husky te250i exhaust system, Kawasaki kxf forks, a Yamaha front wheel, Yamaha handle bars, KTM chain guides, and a 2006 Husky te450 rear rim. Galvanised pipe was used for wheel spacers.
"The levers were made of some kind of lead because they never broke, but they bent in every direction before being bent back again. Some kind of rare compound that the engine was also made of - indestructible stuff."
But the pièce de ré·sist·ance was the fuel tank: it was a thing of beauty!
After it wore through the top plastic of the tank under the seat, he used one side of a 6L Penrite oil container and melted it in with a soldering iron and butter knife.
In his words "It worked great for over a year with no sign of failing! If you ever need to repair a fuel tank......"
"That bike spent that WHES season being abused over and over without much in the way of love and nothing in the way of money.
It was run on secondhand tyres and freebies from anyone giving away anything. Despite what everyone else was running, I never ran a moose. I only had heavy duty tubes running at 12psi! I also never ran a gummy - not once."
Incredibly Frankensteins dirty little secret almost took out the Bronze championship. Adam 'spit on the palm' swears that he could have won ".. if not for a poor choice of tyre in the last Toodyay Terror round which saw me drop a lot of places - hybrid trails tyres are terrible at 12psi, just so you know!".
"I know a lot of people thought it was stupid that I would run 12psi enduro tyres and motor cross tyres; that I wouldn’t spend money on anything that would have helped an absolute shitload. But I wasn’t really ever racing the same race they were!"
"For me it wasn’t about using every go fast bit as a leverage point to achieve that extra 10% performance. For me it was about running the season by making the most of the least amount possible."
What WHES was for Backpack was "community". It was the people that made his season happen, not the dollars spent.
And for that I thought it best to let him have a shout out to that community. The people that kept the bike going when, in all seriousness, it should have been put out of it's misery:
Katie Liddelow for supporting me and encouraging me through the years of racing, wouldn’t have done it without her support;
Micheal Frankis for the husky exhaust system;
Carissa Leigh and Jamie for the tyres and Carissa for the hand me down underclass gear;
Tim Burrows for the handle bars from his KX;
Some guy from the Mildwood for the bolt to put my foot peg back on;
Brenton Blackberry for more tyres and bike offers;
Ben Wyper for (&&* all but we love him;
Tiana Hunt for the adoption of the outcast I am;
Craig for returning the missing bits that were found on the track;
Tyrone Turner for getting me water into my rads when Ben Wyper destroyed my caps; and
The greater WHES community that was inspiring enough to hold the clown act together for the season.
"It was an experience to have so much come together for such an awesome time. People that are thinking about getting into hard enduro need to know they don’t have to have nice gear to do well or belong."
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