On The Pegs August - 2019 - Volume 4 - Issue 8 | Page 72

On The Pegs
72
R
acers can have good years and bad years, and often it’s something behind the
scenes that determines which. The same can be true of race series; and EnduroCross
has recently had a few tough years. It had been owned by The Enthusiast Network,
but without an off-road group running the operation, the series was not a priority. It nearly
went under until Bonnier Corp took the reins for the 2017 and 2018 seasons; it revitalized
interest and attendance, but that company had its own problems and in late 2018, after the
series had wrapped up, Bonnier sold the series to WHR, a promoter in Kent, Washington that
held its own monster truck, supermoto and arenacross events. Riders, teams and fans were
curious how they’d run with the EnduroCross series. Unfortunately, they lost the momentum
before even a schedule had been made, and once again it looked like the series was going
away.
But the man who brought EnduroCross to America, Eric Peronnard, hadn’t given up on
the sport’s potential – it just needed to be in the right hands. With this in mind, and a plan
to pull the 2019 season out of its nosedive, Perronard teamed up with Tod Hammock, a man
who might not be familiar to off-road racers, but one with a career’s worth of experience in
Arenacross promotion (he’s the president and founder of Cycle City Promotions that runs
the Kicker Arenacross Winter Series) to know how to put together and run a series that is
both entertaining and profitable enough to remain healthy.
We recently got a chance to sit down with Hammock to discuss what happened, what’s
been done, and the future of EnduroCross.
You’re starting out with a three-round series, but then you’re scheduled
for a full-blown series starting next year, right?
Right. By the time that we got our hands on it, we knew that it was going to
be difficult to put a six or eight race series together. A lot of people didn’t have
funding to go that distance. So we elected to keep it alive, run a good, solid,
2019 ENDUROCROSS SERIES SCHEDULE:
• August 24th, 2019 | Prescott Valley, Arizona | Findlay Toyota Center
• October 19th, 2019 | Denver, Colorado | National Western Center
• October 26th, 2019 | Boise, Idaho | Ford Idaho Center