Carrer
Roland Noel Liszka was born on 23 December 2004. His father, Richárd Liszka, also rides a motorbike, having started racing again a few years earlier, in 2001, so not surprisingly his son was also quickly infected by petrol fumes. He even played handball at one point, but then chose motor racing. He took part in his first race at an extremely early age, before his seventh birthday, and from then on there was no stopping him.
“I was very young, maybe five or six years old,” Roland recalled the very beginning of his career. – My first race was at the end of the 2011 season, in motocross, on a 50cc bike. My first full season was in 2012, and I won the Western Cup.”
In 2013, he repeated the first place and a year later finished second in the 65cc class. In 2015, he started with an 85cc engine and finished fourth overall, which he improved by one the following year. In 2017 and 2018, he stayed with this machine class, finishing second and then third in the MX85 category of the Hungarian Motocross Championship. In the last year, he also competed in the Slovakian Championship, where he took second place.
In 2019, he finished second in the MX2 Adult II class, and the next two years he finished third in the MX2 Class I. Last year, he won the Junior UMX Open with a perfect performance, but only participated in two rounds of MX2. This year he only competed in one race, winning his category.
Endurocross has been Roland’s main discipline for a long time, so motocross has become a bit of a foreign concept to him, although he still loves it. In endurocross, he completed his first two races in 2013, then finished sixth in 2014, and a year later he was second in the Hungarian junior championship. In the three seasons that followed, no one could beat him, and he finished fourth as a team in 2017 and second in 2018 with Korda Racing. At the same time, he finished in third position in the E1 category of Division III.
In 2019, they won this category as well, and triumphed as a team. He also participated in two rounds of the SuperEnduro Cup Prestige and Open categories: in the former, his best result was fourth place, while in the latter he won all six of his races. This catapulted him to fourth position in the overall standings.
In 2020, they won the E1 Division II, as they were also unbeaten as a team with Korda Racing. In 2021, Roland competed for the first time in enduro racing, where he immediately came out on top. He won the enduro and endurocross sections of the Hungarian championship and, of course, the overall, and managed to repeat this performance the following year. In the same season he scored the second most points in the SuperEnduro Cup Prestige category behind Norbert Zsigovits. As for this season, he won nine out of ten races in enduro to become PRO2 champion, while in endurocross he also claimed the final victory with a confident performance. He and his team are in second and fifth place respectively, and in endurocross he and his father are a duo.
In parallel, of course, Roland is also a regular on the international scene. In motocross, he competed at the 2019 European Junior Championships, but his main achievements are in enduro. He made his debut at the Superenduro World Championships in 2019, then only in the insert races. His best result was a sixth place in Budapest.
In the following years, he participated in the European Cup, where he finished second in the race, third in the overall standings and fourth in the standings. In the four races of the two previous editions, he finished three thirds and one seventh in the four races of the two weekends, which gave him third place in the championship behind Dan Peace and Márk Szőke.
After the world championships, this year he mainly competed in classic enduro races. At the World Cup round in Slovakia, he won the first day and finished second in the two-stroke Open category on the second day. He later competed at the European Championships in Poland, where he finished third on both days, and his latest success came on home soil, defending his title from last year at the King’s Choice. Despite all this, Roland is not satisfied with his season.
“I could have done a lot more,” he said, “I had the pace at times, which is good, but I’m not satisfied with the results. In superenduro, however, I think I learned a lot from last season. Even if it didn’t work out that way and I’m not happy with it, it was very instructive for the future.”
Roland is moving up a gear this season and will not compete in the European Cup, but against better competition in the junior category. As in previous years, the field will visit Budapest, only in February 2024 they will compete in the much larger capacity MVM Dome instead of the Papp László Sport Arena. Of course, the 18-year-old rider is not only looking to do well in his home country.
“I want to race in the junior category throughout the 23-24 Superenduro World Championship and make it to all seven rounds,” he said, “I would like to make it to all the finals first and foremost, and I would be happy with top five in any race. Of course, it’s a big step and I wouldn’t collapse mentally if I didn’t get it, but I’d say top five overall in every event is the goal.”
Although he has already achieved some good results, Roland has much bigger long-term goals. “I can compete in the junior category until I’m twenty-three years old, and until then I would like to be World Junior Champion in super enduro. This is my main goal for the near future,” he said. – After that, the top thing would be to be able to make a living out of motorcycling, to do what I love and to do it for a living.”
For a long time, Roland was supported mainly by his family and coaches, and later sponsors came along.In 2022, the year the programme was launched, he became a sponsor of the Hungarian Motorsport Academy, then known as HUMDA Academy, which was a significant step in his career, as it opened new doors for him.
“It helps me with a lot of things, almost everything,” he said, praising the programme. We went to a training camp in Spain last year and if it wasn’t for HUMDA behind me, it probably would never have happened. And this season it will help even more as we now really need to start travelling the world. It’s only the Superenduro Worlds that I’ll be visiting Bulgaria, England and France, so that’s another reason why it’s really good. A big thank you goes to them.”