World Moto Clash cancelled as $1m motorcycle race finally runs out of road
World Moto Clash has pulled the plug on its planned Mid-Ohio debut, with founder Stanford Crane blaming a funding dispute, and we can't say we're entirely surprised.
Remember World Moto Clash? The rather ambitious motorcycle race that promised no rules, a $1 million winner's prize and a field of bikes capable of basically anything?
Well, it turns out it isn't going to happen after all.
The inaugural World Moto Clash event, scheduled for Mid-Ohio on September 18-20, has been cancelled after founder and CEO Stanford W. Crane Jr pulled the plug on the project following a dispute with a potential investor.
And, if we're being completely honest, this probably isn't the biggest surprise.
Just two weeks ago, we reported that Crane had put the chances of the race actually happening at 50/50 after an investor failed to provide the required funding. At the time, the event was supposed to be less than five weeks away, with organisers still trying to secure the money required to stage a race promising a total purse of $2.86 million, including $1m for the winner. Talk about last minute!
Now Crane has confirmed that the whole thing is off.
In a statement published on the World Moto Clash website, Crane says the investor had attempted to switch from being an investor to taking control of the company "on the cheap". Crane says he rejected the offer, describing the situation as a "massive red-flag moment" and adding: "So, I said, 'No!'"
It's fair to say this is not the sort of sentence you normally expect to find in a motorcycle racing press release.
According to Crane, WMC had more than 160 riders entered for the 48 available places on the grid, with the operational and media teams ready to put on the event. The problem, somewhat inevitably for a race with a $2.86m purse, was finding the money to actually make it happen.
The organisation now says it will not announce another event until it has secured the funding required to support a 2027 season – which is probably the way things should have gone first time around.
Another race that never quite made it
The World Moto Clash saga is a reminder that motorcycle racing is littered with hugely ambitious projects that looked fantastic on paper but never quite made it onto the asphalt.
The Circuit of Wales is probably the most obvious British example. The proposed £280m Ebbw Vale circuit secured planning permission, landed the rights to host MotoGP and even had grand plans for hotels, karting, off-road facilities and an automotive centre of excellence.
There was just one small problem. It was never actually built.
The project eventually collapsed amid financial problems, with the British MotoGP race ending up at Donington Park before eventually settling at Silverstone. Visordown once described the Circuit of Wales rather more bluntly as a track that "somehow made it onto the calendar despite never existing beyond a PowerPoint presentation".
Then there was the Isle of Wight Diamond Races.
Announced with plans for a spectacular 12.4-mile road course, 200mph motorcycles and hopes of attracting tens of thousands of spectators to the island, the event looked like it could become Britain's answer to the Isle of Man TT.
Instead, it became a saga of postponements, consultations, paperwork and rebranding. The Diamond Races were postponed from 2021 to 2022 before the original concept was eventually scrapped and replaced by the Isle of Wight Road Races, which themselves were subsequently postponed.
None of that means ambitious motorcycle racing projects are a bad thing. Quite the opposite. The sport needs people prepared to try something different, particularly in a market where finding serious money for motorcycle racing is hardly straightforward.
World Moto Clash certainly had an intriguing idea. Throw away conventional technical regulations, allow almost anything to race and put a million dollars on the line for the winner. It was bonkers, but it was the good sort of bonkers. The problem was that motorcycle racing still has to obey one particularly stubborn rule: somebody has to pay for it.
WMC says it is still moving forward and intends to return once the necessary funding is secured for 2027.
So perhaps this isn't the end of World Moto Clash. Perhaps it will eventually appear, the bikes will line up, somebody will win that million dollars, and we'll all look back at this story and wonder what the fuss was about.
Ahh, we can dream, can't we?
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Simon (AKA Toad) has been working within the motorcycle industry for more than twelve years, and a member of the motorcyclist family since birth. Growing up around British-built single and twins, it was inevitable that a life on two wheels was on the cards, from a very early age!
