First with a Formula 1 racing car, then with a Moto GP motorbike and now with a mountain bike: Red Bull is getting involved in the legendary Hahnenkamm downhill run in KitzbühelThe Mondraker team, popularly known as the "Streif", always comes up with something very special. This year, the Austrian soda giant sent Austrian Markus Stöckl down the 3312 metre-long slope on his Mondraker downhill bike. Stöckl, who set a new speed record of 167.6 km/h on a production mountain bike in the Chilean Atacama Desert in December 2016, is following in the footsteps of Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen and MotoGP world champion Marc Marquez.
The Streif has an average gradient of 27 per cent over its 3.3 kilometres. This includes well-known passages such as the Mausefalle, the Karussell, the Seidlalm jump and the dreaded Zielhang, which are specially iced for the skiers' downhill race. In order to have grip on the snow-ice slope, Stöckl equipped his downhill bike with special tyres with 15 millimetre long spikes. Stöckl made several descents and is said to have reached a top speed of 106 km/h on one of his runs.
"When you're allowed to ride a bike on a slope like this, it's a special honour, which I treated with the necessary respect so as not to destroy the work done by the ski club and clear 100 metres of fence. The well-known key sections were also tough for me, where I had to fight hard to catch the gates," said Stöckl afterwards. But compared to the fastest skiers, the biker's video looks far less spectacular. This is because the ski racers sometimes reach top speeds of 140 km/h and jump around 50 metres at the mousetrap. For comparison: Stöckl travelled for more than three minutes, while Fritz Strobl's course record is 1:51.58 minutes. But see for yourself:
