2025 TKO Hard Enduro

There are race weekends where you walk the course, check out your lines, sip some electrolytes, ease in with a little warmup. And then there’s the Red Bull Tennessee Knockout: a three-day, heat-stroke-inducing gauntlet designed to remind motorcycles and their riders just how fragile they really are. At the Trials Training Center in Sequatchie, Tennessee, you'll find vertical, off-camber climbs strewn with mossy, wet logs. Steep descents that will make you wish you skipped breakfast. Boulders the size of your mom's house. Whoever decided Tennessee in August was the perfect time for a knockout race had a great sense of humor. The humidity is thick, the afternoon thunderstorms make it thicker, and you can only hope you're lucky enough to be on a race team with an air-conditioned trailer.

For 15 years, the TKO has been the final round of the AMA US Hard Enduro Premier Championship and the AMA Grand Championship for Extreme Off-Road. Pro racers fly in from around the world to maintain their streaks or battle for the podium. The crowds they inadvertently bring to cheer from the sidelines are legendary and the spectator energy is exhilarating. (What was with that guy with the trumpet?)

Even cooler (in my opinion) is, for the last four years, TKO race organizers Sean Finley and Eric Peronnard have supported the growth of electric in hard enduro racing by having a standalone electric class hosted by our good friends at Electric Cycle Rider. The electric class has grown large and diverse enough that 2025 was the first year the ECR eMoto class was split into Amateur and Expert. Both still had to survive Friday’s hot-lap qualifier (bit of a knockout in and of itself), Saturday’s TKO 1 knockout race, and the Sunday finale where the expert class faced the full TKO course and amateurs raced a slightly modified, slightly less intense version of that expert course (unless they took a wrong turn—more on that later).

Naturally, we brought the new Zero XE to test our fate at what is allegedly the hardest enduro race in North America.

If I'm being honest, racing TKO wasn't originally a part of the plan for 2025. Zero doesn't have a big race budget or a sports marketing team to support nationwide podium efforts. What we do have is a grassroots group of enthusiasts who meet for lunch on Tuesdays to talk all things motorsports, and a few of us happen to have a need for speed and AMA memberships.

When Tucker from Electric Cycle Rider reached out to ask if he could put his friend and test rider Dustin in TKO on his Zero XE media-loaner, I thought, "huh...can he?" I've been a long-time hard enduro fan and, with an awareness of how demanding the sport is, I had a lot of questions—Can the XE take that kind of a beating? Will the motor or controller overheat on those endless vertical hill climbs during a Tennessee summer race? Who's Dustin? Can we properly support a Zero racer from 2,500 miles away in California? If I fly out to support will Mani Lettenbichler talk to me? So many unknowns!

What I do know is, racing is fun and a race like this would be an incredible test for a new off-road bike like the Zero XE. I ran the idea by our Prototype & Test team and they said, "are you kidding? We're coming, and we're racing too. Let's get started."

We had a few weeks to prep and a lot to plan for. Gummy tires, plushie mousses, dialing in the controls, packing lists, booking flights, scheduling bike transport, crating tools and motorcycles. Heavier duty skid plate? Not enough time. Trevor Doniak, Zero's Chief Test Rider who's been testing, riding, and racing Zeros for the last 16 years, signed up to compete for team Zero. The only rough part about signing up at the last minute is he only had time to get one ride in on TKO-like terrain before we had to pack his race bike in a crate and ship it East.

We hauled seven Zeros total to Tennessee. Three were race-prepped XEs:

• One built by Electric Cycle Rider for Dustin Foudray, delivered cross-country in Cody Webb's trailer.
• Two more built by the Zero Motorcycles team in Scotts Valley: one for Trevor Doniak, and one set aside as a spare-parts bike.

The rest? Demo bikes for attendees and spectators to try out. If you're already sweating through your gear in the Sequatchie humidity, feeling the wind in your hair on a bike that doesn't put off any heat might be a welcome relief.

Before we knew it we were landing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, hitting the ground running to uncrate bikes at the Trials Training Center and get ready to race.

Friday kicked off with a short 3-mile hot-lap, each rider running solo to lock in Saturday’s starting order. That was a great intro to the terrain and left us plenty of time to fuss over the bikes and pace around nervously, thanks to the general lack of maintenance electric motorcycles demand.

The Electric Cycle Rider crew came prepared this year, strapping “thermal management devices” (read: tiny battery-powered fans) inside their skid plates after learning the hard way about overheating on Tennessee’s endless hill climbs.

Trevor, meanwhile, had his eyes on the XE’s stock skid plate and whether it could shield the motor and controller from the incoming boulder fields. With our aftermarket version still in development, we hacked a safeguard: a 3D-printed block wedged neatly between motor, controller, and skid plate for extra insurance. A solid plastic block does obstruct airflow to the motor and controller, but as it turns out, the extra protection wasn’t really needed—the XE’s impressive ground clearance shrugged off the rocks as if it had been purpose-built for them.

What I haven't mentioned about Friday: TKO co-host and Cycle News GM Sean Finley hopped on our spare-parts XE to help finish marking the course. When he got back, he told his partner-in-crime Jesse Ziegler, Cycle News editor and the face of the SUPERHARD series, that maybe he ought to race the Zero XE instead of the Surron he’d planned on. “Now’s the time to go talk those Zero guys into handing you this bike.”

What’s the worst that could happen? Jesse’s specialty is hopping on unfamiliar bikes and making them do absurd things. Within an hour of his qualifying hot-lap, Finley and Ziegler had talked us into it, and Jesse was kitted up on our backup XE. Spoiler: it was the right call. That guy is a great rider who is down for anything, hilarious, and we're certain he thrives on chaos.

Saturday nearly started with disaster when the eMoto race launched just five minutes after the riders’ meeting and the guys had to scramble to the start. Luckily, everyone made it in time and the day unfolded smoothly. After a full Friday of hydrating and fine-tuning suspension with the Sirris crew (who showed up in Tennessee to support every rider on their setup—love those guys), the racers were ready.

The TKO 1 knockout race stretched 14 brutal miles through the Sequatchie backwoods, long enough to test the riders but short enough to avoid a battery swap. The rushed start did cause Dustin to forget to turn on his cooling fan, and the dash lit up with a temperature warning after one punishing climb. Even so, no one hit a power cutback and the sensor warning on the dash cleared quickly. We chased the action on foot and by bike, cheering for our guys and electric racers in general as riders either blasted past or wrestled through the boulder gardens.

By the end, the support crew was buzzing. All three riders—Trevor, Dustin, and Jesse—rolled back into the pit with both bikes and bodies intact, grinning ear to ear. Each landed in the top 20 out of thirty-plus eMoto racers, securing a spot in Sunday’s TKO 2 final race.

Sunday’s TKO 2 race brought the top 20 eMoto riders back for a brutal 15-mile course. The bikes only needed a few final tweaks, and we rolled in as ready as we’d ever been. To keep things safe, amateurs’ bikes were marked with neon tape so course marshals could steer them away from the pro-only sections. Dustin Foudray didn’t need the tape, he was already signed up for the expert class. He might be a machine...with his mountain bike background, he could probably race Red Bull Hardline in his sleep.

While a battery swap wasn't entirely necessary, there was a designated spot at 'Uphill Swamp' for battery swap support. Some riders passed by, but the Zero crew chose to stop in for a breather and a fully charged 4.3kWh battery before tackling the boulder-strewn climb.

Of course, Murphy’s Law made an appearance. Trevor Doniak and several other amateur riders slipped past the monitors and dropped straight into the expert route. Jesse Ziegler nearly joined them, but was flagged just in time. Freed from disaster, he made quick work of the amateur course, charging ahead, and crossed the Red Bull arch sweaty and smiling in his third or fourth (we've lost count) TKO but first on the Zero XE. Look out for his SUPERHARD video when it drops.

Trevor wasn’t so lucky. He muscled the XE through brutal boulder gardens but timed out just shy of the two-hour cutoff. Three days of punishment and nearly finishing one of the hardest enduros around on his first try? That’s a win in our book.

And then there was Dustin. Somehow he came across the finish looking like he’d just wrapped a warmup lap. Under his unassuming exterior is a lifetime of skill, grit, and focus. While other riders saw batteries die, bikes break, or bodies give out, Dustin kept charging and landed a third-place podium behind Eddie Karlsson on a Stark and Max Beaupre on a Surron. Simply entering this race deserves respect, but getting on the podium? Seriously impressive. His cooling fan did its job, too—never saw a hint of overheating from the controller or motor on the XE.