Seven rounds, fourteen race days, one champion

Our first season as title partner of the Tsubaki FIM Junior Enduro World Championship was an interesting one, and it showed what a year spent standing in the dust teaches a chain manufacturer.

When we put our name to the Junior class of the FIM EnduroGP World Championship for 2026, we did it for two reasons. The first is easy to explain: this is where the sport's next generation is made, and supporting young riders is how a racing brand earns its place in the paddock. The second reason is less visible from the outside. There is no test rig anywhere in our business that punishes a drive chain the way a full Junior enduro season does. Allow us to take you on a recap of how our first season as title partner panned out, round by round. 

Sicily: a rookie makes a statement

The season opened in Custonaci on 10–12 April, on dry, dusty, rocky Sicilian ground. Two of the riders lining up were Junior rookies: Italy's Alberto Elgari on the TM MOTO Boano Factory Enduro Team machine, and France's Romain Dagna with KTM Pro Racing Sport. They finished the weekend first and second on both days. Elgari took Saturday by seven seconds and Sunday by four, having been just 0.43s ahead after the second enduro test. A double win on debut is a rare thing. It set the tone for everything that followed. 

Oliana and Finland: the counterpunch

Spain, 1–3 May, brought light rain to Oliana — never enough to make real mud, but more than enough to make grip unpredictable. Dagna struck back to win day one with Kevin Cristino second and Elgari third; Elgari answered on Sunday, leading by 21 seconds at the start of the second lap and winning by fourteen.

Finland, three weeks later, was the round that turned the championship on its head. A 59-kilometre loop through the sandy forest trails of Vierumäki got rougher every time the field went through it. Dagna won Saturday; Cristino took Sunday by a commanding 28 seconds. Elgari went 5–3, his weakest weekend of the year, undone by a mistake on the final enduro test. He left Finland three points behind Dagna in the standings.

Why we stand at the side of the track

That first third of the season is a neat illustration of why a chain manufacturer belongs at the races rather than only in the laboratory. In eight weeks, the class raced on abrasive Sicilian rock, on wet and greasy Catalan hillsides, and through deep Nordic sand. Three completely different circumstances, all attacked using the same chain. Rock chips and peens. Water and grit find their way past sealing rings. Sand behaves like a grinding paste, working at pin and bush surfaces and pulling lubricant out of the joint until elongation starts to climb.

You can reproduce each of those individually on a bench. What you cannot reproduce is the sequence: the same chain, the same rider, the same fatigue, weekend after weekend, with a mechanic's twenty minutes at the end of each day. We look at the whole grid, not just one garage,  plenty of these bikes run other brands, and that is exactly why the paddock is worth being in. Watching a class of this quality is how you learn which failure modes actually matter to a rider in the last test of a long day, and which ones only matter to an engineer. So after carefully examining the first part of the season, it was back to the tracks for us!

Fafe, twice: heat, dust and holes

Portugal hosted back-to-back rounds on 12–14 and 19–21 June, both at Fafe. The first weekend was hot, dry and dusty; Elgari won six of the ten stages to take day one by 24 seconds, before a rare off-day left him sixth on Sunday as Leo Joyon claimed his maiden Junior win and Triumph Factory Racing's first EnduroGP victory. A week later the same tests, already broken up, dried into deep ruts and big holes under a strong sun. The start was even moved an hour earlier to cope with the heat. Joyon won Saturday, Elgari won Sunday, and the two of them were now the headline story of the championship.

France and Wales: bringing it home

At Saint-Agrève on 17–19 July, Thibault Giraudon took his first win of the season on day one, with Elgari passing Dagna on the final test for third. On Sunday Elgari won by eleven seconds, claiming his sixth victory of the year, while Joyon took second by one hundredth of a second. It was that kind of season.

The finale came at Rhayader, Wales, on 7–9 August: dry, dusty, and rougher by the hour. Joyon won both days emphatically. Elgari finished second on Saturday, which stretched his cushion to eighteen points, and then rode a deliberately conservative Sunday to fifth, refusing to be drawn into a fight he did not need. Dagna sealed the FIM Junior2 Enduro World Cup on Saturday. And at the end of fourteen race days, the Junior title went to Italy.

Alberto Elgari, 2026 Junior Enduro World Champion

Elgari's championship record reads 1-1, 3-1, 5-3, 1-6, 3-1, 3-1, 2-5: six overall wins and five further podiums, and only one day all year outside of the top five. He took the Tsubaki FIM Junior Enduro World Championship by nine points from Joyon, and added the FIM Junior1 Enduro World Cup on top. It is a first world title, in his first Junior season, at 20 years old. Our congratulations to him, to TM MOTO Boano Factory Enduro Team and to the Pata Talenti Azzurri FMI programme that brought him here, and to Joyon and Dagna, who made him earn every point of it.

As for us: we finish the season with a year's worth of observation from seven of the hardest terrains in the sport, and a much sharper sense of the questions worth asking. Sealed chain technology has moved a long way in the forty-odd years since our first O-ring, but the reason it moves at all is that somebody keeps standing at the side of the track, watching what real riders do to real hardware, to understand where we can continue to improve. We will be back in 2027!