Manuel Lettenbichler and Mitch Brightmore have almost identical best weekends. Lettenbichler's is a perfect 33, at Lagares and again at Abestone. Brightmore's is 32, at Silver Kings. On peak form there is just 1 point between them.
Lettenbichler leads the 2026 FIM Hard Enduro World Championship by 24.
The difference is not the ceiling. It is the floor. Lettenbichler's worst round of the season is worth 27 points. Brightmore's is worth 20. 5 rounds in, the 7-point gap between their bad days has become the championship.
It is starker further down the order. Only Brightmore and Billy Bolt have ever scored more in a round than Lettenbichler's worst. Teodor Kabakchiev's finest weekend of the year is 24. So is Ashton Brightmore's. Mario Román's is 22.
33 points, and where they hide
The 2026 regulations split each round into 3 scoring competitions. The prologue pays 3 points to the winner, 2 to 2nd, 1 to 3rd. The sprint pays down to 10th, 10 for the win. The main event pays the full championship table, 20 down to 1 point for 15th. So 33 is the weekend maximum.
61 per cent of that sits in the main event. 9 per cent sits in the prologue.
Split the 24 points between Lettenbichler and Brightmore by session and the structure shows itself. 16 came in the main events, 6 in the sprints, 2 in the prologues.
Lettenbichler has won 3 of the 5 prologues, for 9 points out of a possible 15. Brightmore has won 2, for 7. Across 5 rounds the entire prologue competition has moved them 2 points apart. The mains have moved them 16.
Then comes the clause that shapes everything. The World Championship runs across all rounds "with no void results." Every round counts. The Junior World Championship takes the best 6 results. So do the Senior, Women's and Youth World Cups. The premier class is the only category in the championship with nowhere to put a bad weekend.
Wade Young shows what that costs. He has missed 2 of the 5 rounds, Silver Kings and Abestone, and sits on 31 points. In any other category on the entry list — 8 rounds, best 6 counting — both absences would simply be discarded and his season would be intact. In the class he actually races in, they are permanent.
How few riders finish
The reason a floor is so hard to build is that hard enduro barely lets anyone build one.
12 riders cleared all 30 checkpoints in the Alestrem main. 10 of the Gold field completed all 9 laps at Lagares. 6 completed all 6 at Silver Kings. 6 completed all 10 at Forza Orza. 5 completed all 6 at Abestone. In every case the classification below that line collapses into riders a lap or more adrift.
Penalties barely register against it. Kabakchiev lost 1m 48s at the Silver Kings sprint for failing to pass a section correctly and still scored 7. Moore lost 3m 30s at Lagares for gaining an advantage off-track and still scored 5. Karlsson lost 1 minute at Forza Orza for cutting the track and still scored 5. The regulations punish mistakes in minutes. Only failing to finish is punished in points.
Billy Bolt won round 1
At Alestrem in April, Bolt scored 29 of a possible 33: 2nd in the prologue, victory in the sprint final, 2nd in the main behind Lettenbichler. It was the best weekend anyone had at that point in the season.
He is now equal 6th on 76 points, 74 behind.
Lagares started it. He went out of the Portuguese prologue at checkpoint 6, 1 of 8 Gold riders to stop at the same place, and took nothing from a session he would have been favoured to win. Then he missed Silver Kings altogether: 3 sessions, no laps, no points. He recovered at Forza Orza with 21. Abestone gave him 11.
The zero did not cost him the championship. His 5 rounds read 29, 15, 0, 21, 11, and the shape of that is a decline rather than a single catastrophe. What the zero removed was any margin for the decline to happen inside.
The pace has not gone anywhere. At Abestone he was 2nd in the prologue, 0.79 of a second off Lettenbichler, then set the 2nd-quickest lap in the sprint and the 4th-quickest in the main. He converted all of that into 11 points. He has been quick on more days than he has been quick and finished, and that distinction is what the standings measure.
The steady man, and what a bad day cost him
Through 3 rounds Kabakchiev was the purest expression of consistency in the field. He had not won a prologue, a sprint or a main event. His main results read 15, 15, 15. His round totals read 22, 24, 22. He was 3rd on the strength of never having a bad day.
At Forza Orza he had one. 13th in the main, 2 laps down, 6 points from the weekend. His 4th-quickest best lap said the speed was intact; something else went wrong.
At Abestone he was 3rd in the main for 15, and 3rd in the championship again.
An unbroken run of unremarkable weekends would have been a tidy pattern. What actually happened is more useful. The buffer that 4 months of banking points had built absorbed the bad round and closed again — Ashton Brightmore sits 4 points behind him rather than past him. Bolt's zero was never absorbed by anything, because his good round arrived before it rather than around it.
Consistency is not a personality trait in this championship. It is a balance you draw down when the day goes wrong.
What an average can't see
Average finishing position is the natural way to measure how good a rider has been. Across all 15 sessions of the season so far, in Gold scratch order, it reads like this.
| Rider | Average position | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Lettenbichler | 2.5 | 150 |
| M. Brightmore | 3.3 | 126 |
| Kabakchiev | 5.5 | 94 |
| A. Brightmore | 5.9 | 90 |
| Bolt | 7.2 | 76 |
| Román | 7.7 | 76 |
| Karlsson | 8.0 | 62 |
| Moore | 8.2 | 69 |
| Gandola | 10.5 | 49 |
Scratch order counts every Gold starter, including riders who entered a single round without registering for the championship. At Silver Kings that mattered: Jonny Walker won the Super Kings prologue with the fastest lap, Trystan Hart won the sprint race and finished 2nd in the main with the quickest lap of the day, and Ryder Leblond was 5th in the prologue and 6th in that main. Hard enduro's defining feature, in the words of the FIM regulations, is that combined starting field of amateurs and professionals. It is why they appear in the results and not in the standings.
The points column is deliberately out of order, and that is the whole argument. Karlsson has the better average and 7 fewer points than Moore. Bolt has a better average than Román and exactly the same score.
Lettenbichler and Mitch Brightmore are 0.8 of a place apart. On the road, across 15 sessions, there is almost nothing between them. On the scoreboard there are 24 points. An average is a single number standing in for a distribution, and the distribution is where the championship lives.
And Bolt's 7.2 is calculated from 12 sessions, because 3 of them do not exist. He has a better average than Román, who is level with him on points, and better than Karlsson and Moore, who are within 14 points of him having started every session of the year. An average finishing position cannot see a round a rider did not attend. The championship can see nothing else.
Moore is the counter-case, and the reason to distrust his own average. His 8.2 is the arithmetic of a season that started badly and turned: he averaged 13th across the 3 Alestrem sessions and 3rd across the 3 at Abestone. 7th overall, and 40 of his 69 points have come in the last 2 rounds. He goes to the Roof of Africa in the best form of his season, on home ground.
One for 2027
The regulations are explicit about what happens when a rider outside the championship finishes ahead of one inside it. Points go to the eligible riders "in respect of their finishing position within those eligible riders." The positions compress. When Hart finished 2nd in the Silver Kings main, Lettenbichler in 3rd took the 17 points for 2nd, and the same logic ran down the order.
The alternative would be to void those places rather than close them up: if a non-registered rider finishes in a points-paying position, nobody takes those points.
Run it against Silver Kings, the round where it would bite hardest, and the effect is smaller than it sounds. Lettenbichler would have finished the weekend 3 points down on what he scored, Mitch Brightmore 2 — a net swing of 1 point in a championship that stands at 24. Mostly it would have lowered everybody's total, and it would have done so on the basis of who happened to enter a particular round, which is not something a registered rider controls.
The principle is still worth arguing about. A championship point is meant to say something about where a rider finished, and at the American round more than half the front runners in some sessions were outside the championship. The compressed order said something different from the timing sheet. Nothing about it would have altered 2026. Whether it would make 2027 more interesting is a question for the people who write the rules rather than the people who count the points.
3 rounds left
Lettenbichler has taken 150 of a possible 165. 99 points remain, so a 24-point deficit is not arithmetically a problem for Mitch Brightmore.
The problem is what closing it requires. Not a better weekend than Lettenbichler's best, because Brightmore has already had one of those. A worse weekend from Lettenbichler than any he has had in 5 rounds.
The first chance to force one comes at the Roof of Africa, round 6, on 24-26 September in the Maloti Mountains around Maseru, Lesotho — 3 days, extreme altitude, and a finishing rate that has never respected anyone's championship position. Sea to Sky follows in Turkey on 8-10 October, and 24MX Hixpania closes the season in Spain on 23-25 October. Full figures are on the 2026 standings page.