Mason Klein, one of the fastest rally raid riders in North America, has signed to ride a Kove 450 at the 2024 Dakar Rally.
It’s a bit of an unexpected turn for Klein, who was immediately noticeable as a very fast rider when he broke into Dakar. Considerably younger than much of the competition, Klein finished ninth overall as a Dakar rookie in 2022, and won the W2RC’s Rally2 title that year as well. In 2023, Klein looked like he might improve on those results, moving up to RallyGP class and earning a win on the Dakar Rally’s second stage. But a crash on Stage 9 left him with a head injury, and he was forced to abandon the rally in Stage 13. As a privateer with the BAS Dakar team, he didn’t have a factory ride the rest of the W2RC season. Mechanical woes pushed him out of the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, when he was in line for a top-10 there; at the Sonora Rally, he was last in his class.
By October, Klein was on Facebook saying he didn’t have a ride lined up for the 2024 Dakar Rally, even though it was only a few weeks away. At that point, he was selling off the Kove Rally 450 he owned, simply to raise funds to keep racing.
It looks like his fortunes are turned around now. With a flashy new rally raider unveiled at EICMA this past week, Kove has got Klein on-board to pilot the bike at Dakar! Reportedly, he is not on the actual factory squad, although we still are a few weeks away from Dakar, so who knows how that will paly out. We’ve seen no word yet as to whether Sunier Sunier, Deng Liansong, Fang Minji, the three-man factory team who took all Kove’s bikes across the finish line last year, will return, or whether the brand will contest the rest of the W2RC series in 2024.
Here’s what he posted on Facebook when he made his announcement:
He’s training like mad, he says, and he should be. To say this year will be a challenge will be an understatement. Klein has a lot to prove about himself, and Kove has to prove its solid results last year were not a fluke. We can’t wait to see how it all plays out in January!
