ASO says the 2027 Dakar is on. KTM’s Pit Beirer says his team is in limbo. Hero MotoSports extended for five more years in June and has said nothing since.
The 2027 Dakar isn’t cancelled. That is not the same as being on.
In September, Pit Beirer, KTM’s Racing Director, told SPEEDWEEK: “We’re in limbo. As long as the race remains on the calendar, we have to be prepared.” Same fortnight, the Amaury Sport Organisation wrote back to a query from a small classic-Dakar team: rumours of cancellation are “unfounded” and Dakar 2027 is “progressing as planned”. And the same Hero MotoSports that extended its ASO partnership in June for five more years has, since Beirer’s quote landed, said nothing at all.
We at SBW have been reading Dakar coverage for a decade, and this is not a normal September. The bike grid closed in July at 130 riders. Toyota is adding a hydrogen Hilux. Ford’s back. Dacia isn’t. Ronald van Loon, a Dutch privateer in cars, is skipping outright because he can’t insure his team’s kit onto a ship to Saudi Arabia. Iran was striking the Gulf coast eleven days ago; the Houthis hit a Saudi tanker off Yanbu in August. On paper the race starts on 2 January. In real life, KTM’s containers leave Genoa on 15 November.
That is fifty-seven days from today. When Beirer says “for us, the race begins as early as 15 November”, he is saying something very specific: the equipment goes into a metal box in Genoa that day, sails to Saudi Arabia, and cannot be recalled without eating a season’s budget. This is why factory teams behave differently from privateers. A factory manager who waits to see how the geopolitics play out has already lost. You commit early. You build the bike to a spec that assumed you would race. And then you race, whether the underwriters are still on the phone or not.
Which is where Hero comes in. On 22 June this year, Hero MotoCorp extended with the Amaury Sport Organisation for another five years, running the deal through 2031. On the same afternoon they launched India’s Next Dakar Hero, an eighteen-year-old rider from Maharashtra called Shlok Ghorpade who will train through Morocco toward a Dakar seat.
Reader, be fair to Hero. I have said before that they have no serious R&D history, and I stand by it. But the Dakar programme is the exception. It is a legitimate, expensive, ten-year investment they did not have to make. Ross Branch is currently the defending world champion of the FIM World Rally-Raid Championship on their equipment. Hero MotoSports finished seventh overall at Dakar 2025. This is not marketing dressed as motorsport. It is a factory team that has come, quietly, to matter.
Which is why the silence now is odd. A five-year extension is a decision. It was made in June, before Iranian missiles and Houthi strikes were on the wire. Nobody at Hero has to hand a rider magazine their contingency plan; that is fair. But somebody, at some point, is going to have to tell an eighteen-year-old from Maharashtra whose seat has just been booked for Morocco whether his employer’s Genoa container is going to leave on 15 November or not. That is a question about a real young man’s career, not a comms strategy.
The opinion ledger here at StreetBikersWorld has one line about the Dakar that has stayed true for decades. It is a temple to the human spirit, and its finishers are thrivers. That works when the race is on. If ASO is right and the race is on, my hero CS Santosh’s successors will have their crack at Al-Ula and Ha’il. If Beirer is right, we are fifty-seven days from finding out.
