Distance: 1.026,70 km Duration: 13 hour 34 min Top speed: 183 km/h Average speed: 75 km/h
Sorry, no photos for this post, as the Austrians are weird like that…
It’s forbidden to take videos and photos there to avoid violating their rights.
Day 1. Getting there
As always with the organized trips, getting to the meeting point is a huge dilemma.
When to go? How long before should I get there?
We’ve decided to go a day early, so we could have a good sleep before the training starts. This gave me the opportunity to visit my grandparents and make my way to Sopron to meet my friend.
Day 2. The Turtle group
Since we were new to this group we started our training with the newcomers, and although it did involve some off-road experience and heavy rain, by lunchtime, we were told to be promoted to the lightning group.
The day started as any tour. Safety regulations, recap of the most important information and exchanging contact info, and we were on our way towards Ritzing with a couple of easy corners and the off-road part at the border.
Our first stop was Maria Shutz reviewing the corners, mistakes and our tour guide provided some pointers how to improve.
After a decent amount of driving we finally got our lunch near Semmering, but the rain was so heavy the group decided to proceed towards our hotel slowly.
And that’s when things started to get difficult
One of the riders ran out of gas, so I was running back and forth between him and the gas station to keep him informed, yet get him some gas to be able to make it in the rain to the station.
The rest of the tour was quite easy and by the time we made it back to Hungary, the sun was out.
Day 3. The lightning round
As it was announced, we got promoted to the fast group, that involved going over 70 km/h in the rain on the corkscrews, and that got me in some trouble. My wheels were sliding, I almost ran off of the road, I signaled to the tour guide that I needed to stop.
After a 5 minutes break, some heart to heart discussion I was able to clear my head and the rest of the day started to look bright.
Literally.
The sun came out and we realized that the confidence gathered the previous day has paid off, we were now riding effortlessly on the wet concrete with a decent speed.
At lunchtime we discussed the route options on the way home, that had a couple of nice corners still, but we made it back safely.
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