The upcoming NORRA 500 will be the first with motorcycles since 2021, but it’ll also be the last if the sanctioning body finds it’s not worth the investment. That would be a shame too as Moto director Jimmy Lewis felt he and his team were able to make a heck of a course.

11 bikes are currently entered, meeting the ten-team quota that Lewis set over the summer. Demand to add bikes to the 500 had sparked as riders wanted the NORRA experience but at a shorter distance than the Mexican 1000.

“If you ever want to race in Mexico and get a feel for what it used to be like and what it should be like and could be like if the courses weren’t getting beat to hell by trucks with 45-inch tires and 1000 horsepower and ten thousand UTVs after that, this is the course to come do it,” said Lewis in Friday night’s Moto meeting.

“This is going to determine bikes in the future for NORRA, especially for the 500 and whether we do the 500 again, because it’s a lot of work on our part and it may not necessarily be worth it to NORRA from a financial standpoint.

“Sure, we’d like ten guys to have a really good ride, no doubt, but if it ends up costing them $30 or 40 grand, you can tell how long this is going to last.”

Lewis admitted he was skeptical of having motorcycles at the 500 because the tracks were usually beaten apart by the four-wheelers, which was “not the NORRA I’d grown to live.” Fortunately, race director Eliseo Garcia showed him the areas that the 500 will be passing through and piqued his interest.

“I looked at it on the maps and I go, ‘Hey, knowing what I know about the stuff we used in the 1000 and seeing these other lines, I’ve never been there,’” recalled Lewis. “I show it to Tim Morton and he goes, ‘We can go there?’ I was excited and so I got my hands on all the course files, got to work on making [the roadbook].”

The NORRA bike crew recently scouted the course and were pleased by what they met. Much of the tracks will be flowing and hilly with plenty of rollers and direction changes. Lewis has compared it to the Baja courses he used to race in the ’90s, while Morton recently quipped about “how bitchin’ it is.”

What caught their attention the most, however, was that a good chunk of the desert that they’ll be going through is on private land that typically forbids off-road racing, but their owners agreed to let NORRA use them this one time.

“You’re going to get to ride places that I guarantee you’ve never been before,” Lewis continued. “Places that we haven’t been since the early 1990s. Stringing together the course in a way that you couldn’t do in a pre-run thing because some of these roads, we can only use them for a couple days. It’s really nice.”

The NORRA 500 is scheduled for October 9–12. A meeting for the Cars and UTVs (now split into different categories) took place the night prior.

Featured image credit: Tim Morton