Australian Hard Enduro riders Conor Hennessy and Adam Giles have been confirmed to race for the RFN Global Factory Racing Team at the 2026 Red Bull Tennessee Knockout (TKO), to be held August 28–30 at the Trials Training Center in Sequatchie, Tennessee. Both will ride the RFN Warrior Pro E15 Plus — the brand’s flagship electric off-road machine — putting two Australians and a production electric bike into one of Hard Enduro’s toughest tests.

TKO is the final round of the AMA US Hard Enduro Championship and one of the most physically demanding extreme enduro events in the world, run across multiple knockout rounds on a punishing rock-and-terrain course. For RFN, sending a factory team there is a deliberate move: the brand has been building out its Warrior model range — from the entry-level E5 and E8 up through the E15 and E15 Plus — and TKO doubles as both a genuine competitive test and a very public demonstration of what the E15 Plus can do against the world’s best.

According to Dirt Action, which broke the announcement, Hennessy said he’s “super excited to return to TKO in 2026” and that after several weeks on the E15 it’s “honestly scary how good it is.” RFN General Manager John Bettini framed the pairing as a statement of intent for the brand, saying Hennessy and Giles bring the experience and technical ability to represent RFN “on the global stage.”

The electric angle

This isn’t RFN’s first appearance at TKO, and it isn’t the first time an electric bike has put in a genuinely competitive result there either. Hennessy raced TKO in 2024 on a custom electric machine built by his friend Jeremy Webb, finishing second in the ECR eMoto class — less than a minute behind Canadian Spenser Wilton’s Stark, and ahead of a field that included five different manufacturers (Arctic Leopard, Electric Motion, Surron and others) inside the top five alone.

In 2025, Swedish rider Eddie Karlsson went further again. Riding a Stark Varg, he dominated the 33-rider eMoto Expert qualifying class, then became the first rider ever to reach the TKO main event on an electric bike — after a first-lap crash dropped him to 15th, he fought back to finish seventh outright against the world’s best combustion Hard Enduro riders. That’s not a strong result “for an electric bike” — it’s a strong result in the field, full stop.

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Hennessy now returns on a factory-backed production machine rather than a custom build, and Giles arrives with heavyweight international Hard Enduro credentials of his own — three starts at Red Bull Romaniacs (two Silver class finishes, one Gold), a finish at Erzbergrodeo, a top-10 Expert finish at Extreme Lagares, and a start at Hixpania — but no prior TKO experience and no prior time on an electric bike in competition. His read on the E15 Plus, per Dirt Action, was that it felt “incredibly usable through technical rock sections” — which, if it holds up under TKO’s actual rock gardens, is exactly the trait that matters most there.

What to watch

The eMoto class at TKO has grown fast — from a handful of entrants to 33 in 2025 — and the bar has moved with it: from “credible finish” in 2024 to “first electric bike into the pro main event” in 2025. Hennessy and Giles arrive this year on a purpose-built factory machine rather than a one-off custom bike, which is a different proposition to test than either of the last two years’ storylines. Whether the E15 Plus can match or beat Karlsson’s benchmark result — and how it holds up over TKO’s full three-day format — will say a lot about where production electric Hard Enduro bikes are actually at, not just what the brands claim.

The rest of the 2026 eMoto field is still taking shape. We’ll follow up once entries firm up and again after racing wraps up August 28–30.