What Is Supercross, and Should We Be Excited About Season 3?

On 4 November, seven franchises will bid for 56 riders in Pune. Thirty-two thousand people filled a stadium in Kozhikode to watch the last final. Here is what the sport actually is, what the league has built in two seasons, and what we still cannot find out.

Supercross is motocross moved indoors. Same bikes, same riders — but the track is built inside a stadium out of imported dirt, and the lap takes under a minute. Riders clear jumps of around seventy feet, reaching heights the league compares to a three-storey building, at speeds above 80 km/h. Twenty-two of them race at once. The whole field passes your seat every fifty seconds.

Every design choice in the format is commercial rather than sporting. A hillside motocross circuit cannot be fenced profitably; a stadium has turnstiles. A fifty-second lap suits a broadcast window. It runs floodlit on a Saturday night. And you rent somebody else’s stadium instead of building a circuit. All of which suits India unusually well. Land is scarce, stadiums exist, television is everything.

How big is the sport, really?

Smaller than you would guess, and that matters because it sets the scale for everything the Indian league does.

The entire professional competition economy of global supercross and motocross runs to somewhere between a third and half a billion dollars a year. The IPL’s annual media rights are worth several times that on their own. This is a small sport with one very big country in it. And the most transparent set of accounts in the whole ecosystem belongs to a clothing company — Fox Racing, which did USD 350m of sales and USD 55m of EBITDA in 2022, and sold for USD 540m.

Which makes Kozhikode look better, not worse

Read the last two rows together. A 38-year-old indoor supercross in France, the sport’s biggest rider-supplying nation, tops out around 20,000. The Indian league’s second-season final drew more than 32,000. That number is real, and it is the strongest thing the league has.

For scale on the rider market: the world’s best-paid supercross rider, Jett Lawrence, is on a reported USD 4.5m (INR 42.73 cr) annual base salary. One win in an American main event pays INR 95 lakh. The most ISRL has ever paid for a rider is INR 20.7 lakh.

What India had before the league

Indian motorsport is older than most people assume. Racing began on an airstrip at Sholavaram outside Madras, funded by tyre money — MRF and JK Tyre built the sport here, because a tyre is the one component a consumer can be persuaded to care about through racing. The high-water mark was the Indian Grand Prix at Buddh International Circuit in 2011, 2012 and 2013. It ended partly in an argument about whether motorsport was “sport” or “entertainment” for tax purposes. India has not hosted an F1 race since.

On two wheels, the lineage runs through dirt — and it has always ended somewhere other than a stadium. TVS Racing, founded in 1982, was India’s first factory team. The MRF MoGrip National Supercross Championship still runs eight classes over six rounds across six states, with champions traceable to at least 2005. Three Indians have finished the Dakar Rally — CS Santosh, Aravind K.P. and Harith Noah — all out of Gulf dirt-track and MRF national supercross, all signed by TVS or Hero.

Harith Noah won the Rally2 class at the 2024 Dakar and finished eleventh overall, thirteen years after entering the MRF national championship. That is the pathway Indian dirt racing built: it leads to rally-raid, and manufacturers pay for it.

The base the league is building on

Before Season 1, ISRL’s founders gave an interview to a European motocross outlet. What they said about the Indian base is more candid than anything since.

Three hundred riders. Fifteen new ones a year. No public track. That is the foundation.

Two seasons in

Attendance growth is genuine — roughly 35,000 to 55,000, up about 57%. But 55,000 minus the 32,000 at Kozhikode leaves about 23,000 across Pune and Hyderabad, or roughly 11,500 a round. The season’s headline figure rests heavily on one night in Kerala. And no Indian has ever raced the 450cc premier class.

What it takes to build

The physical craft is real, and it checks out against the best in the world. ISRL uses about 5,000 cubic metres of dirt per track, 500 to 600 truckloads; AMA Supercross at Pittsburgh uses about 4,200 cubic metres from 500 loads. A crew of seven turns a football pitch or athletics track into a supercross circuit in five days, three times a season, and then puts it back.

In Kozhikode, an audit commissioned by the Kerala Football Association in February confirmed the pitch and track were restored to original condition. It was not a smooth process. Six weeks earlier, on 3 January, the same association was saying the INR 25 lakh security deposit it held was “insufficient”, that heavy vehicles had compacted the pitch’s top layer, and that restoration would take “certainly more than 15 days”. The Mayor said the council would be more cautious about non-football events in future.

Both happened — a contested January, a clean February audit. Taken together it still amounts to a federation-verified record of leaving a venue as you found it, which in India is a genuine operating asset. Stadium access is what kills events here.

Sixty times between the top and middle rungs, and free at the end. For the record, in Kozhikode the organisers paid the Corporation INR 1 lakh, plus the refundable INR 25 lakh bond with the football association. India’s largest motorsport crowd watched a race in a municipal stadium hired for about the price of a used car.

What we know about the money, and what we don’t

And here is what we could not find, after going through three seasons of announcements, the franchise owners’ own pages and the news coverage.

• Any franchise fee. Nine franchise entries across three seasons, and no price disclosed by the league or by any team. The league’s own release announcing the Gujarat Trailblazers says only that the owners “acquired” the franchise.
• Any sponsorship value. Season 2 named thirteen partners and claimed “more than 25 brands”. No figure for any of them. And there has been no title sponsor since CEAT’s Season 1, with no exit announcement either way.
• Any broadcast fee. Not for Sports18 and JioCinema in Season 1, nor Eurosport India and FanCode in Season 2. The founders said before Season 1 that the league covers broadcast costs — which suggests these are distribution arrangements rather than rights income.
• Season 2’s actual audience. The league published a 50-million target before the season. Ten months after the final, we could not find a result figure. The American promoter published its season attendance and NBC its average audience within weeks.
• What a franchise earns. Across three seasons we found one owner discussing economics at all — Reise Moto’s Yogesh Mahansaria, who called his team “very successful, for us” and gave no figures. That is a tyre brand describing a marketing platform, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for it to be.

One number we can work out ourselves is the gate. At 55,000 admissions, with tickets from INR 499 and heavy promotional distribution at the first two rounds, the season’s ticket revenue is probably around INR 2 crore. That is our arithmetic, not the league’s — and it is a small number against a stated plan of INR 50 crore a year. We are not claiming the league loses money. We are saying that most of what would tell you either way is not in the public record.

So — should we be excited about Season 3?

Yes, with your eyes open. Here is the honest split.

Reasons to watch

• It is a genuinely good live product. Thirty-two thousand people sold out a Kerala stadium three days early for a sport with no Indian history — more than a 38-year-old French supercross draws.
• Season 3 is the biggest version yet — seven teams, 56 riders, four classes, up from six and 36.
• A new Indian-only class. Indian Futures gives Indian riders a category of their own for the first time since the junior class was dropped.
• The operating craft is real and verified. Five days to build, and a federation-commissioned audit confirming restoration.
• It is the first Indian supercross season under a recognised national federation. On 23 July 2026 the Ministry granted the FMSCI provisional National Sports Federation status. Motorsport came inside India’s sports framework three months ago.

Reasons to stay sceptical

• A better-funded version of this just collapsed. The FIM World Supercross Championship — world-governing-body sanction, a ten-year rights deal, Gulf sovereign-linked capital at launch, the sport’s biggest names — cancelled its entire 2026 season on 7 October after one round. ISRL’s auction follows seventeen days later.
• The grid is mostly imported. Twenty-one per cent of Season 3 registrations are Indian, and no Indian has raced the premier class.
• The development class is closed to Indian bikes. Indian Futures is “250cc, foreign bikes only” — while Bajaj Auto completed its acquisition of control of KTM in November 2025, taking indirect control of about 74.9%. The most likely bike in the class is a KTM, built by a company an Indian conglomerate owns.
• Season 3 venues are still unannounced — eleven days before the auction and seven weeks before round one.
• The calendar has slipped before. Season 1 was cut from four rounds to three. Season 2 ran nine months later than announced. Two of the six original franchises were gone by Season 2.