The Baja Rally is joining with another Mexican rally racing organization to kickstart a new off-road series, dubbed the Mexican Cross-Country Championship.
The Baja Rally was founded in 2012, and runs through Mexico’s Baja peninsula. It’s a separate entity from SCORE’s Baja 1000 series; it’s organized more along the lines of rally raid events like the Dakar.
Now, the Baja Rally’s organizers are joining with Rally Playero Entertainment to announce they are combining two events into one series. The Baja Rally (running Sept. 28-Oct. 2 in 2015) will be the first event of the season, and the second will be Playero’s race, which runs in December next year in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Playero isn’t well-known here in the more northerly regions of the continent, but they’ve been organizing rally raid-style events since 2010. Both the Playero and Baja Rally races will use the same rules, and FIM certified juror Romina Addiego is the operations director for both events. However, the races will be managed by their respective organizations.
Apparently, Mexican motorcycle racer Octavio “Chivo” Valle (a Dakar finisher) was instrumental in bringing the two organizations together, although several racers were already attending both events.
The press releases announcing the new series were full of talk about the bright future of rally raid racing in North America as a result of the new series. It’s hard to say whether the series will actually prove to be the big boost rally racing needs to be successful in our continent; however, now that the Baja 1000 has proven to be a bit unfriendly towards motorcycle racers in recent years, the new series may prove quite interesting to riders looking for high-speed off-road thrills.
