2024 Baja 1000: Patricio Cabrera picks up Kawasaki factory support

After being the final rider to complete the Dakar Rally on a Kawasaki motorcycle, Patricio Cabrera has rejoined the marque with factory backing for November’s Baja 1000 and the 2025 SCORE International season.

Cabrera is the current SCORE Pro Moto Ironman points leader, holding a five-point edge over Brian Roberts entering the fourth and final race of the season. Although 2024 is his first year in the series and riding on his own, he and his KTM have proven stout with three consecutive runner-up finishes at the San Felipe 250, Baja 500, and Baja 400.

Prior to desert racing, he was a motocross champion in his native Chile. In 2013, he made his Dakar début on a Kawasaki KLX450R with backing from Kawasaki Chile CIDEF and finished eighty-fourth overall. He switched to a Kawasaki KX450F in 2017, where his thirty-third was his best career finish during the Dakar’s South American run.

When the Dakar moved to Saudi Arabia in 2020, Cabrera improved to twenty-eighth overall. After Kawasaki eased back its rally programme, he continued to race the event on a KTM 450 Rally in 2020. His tenth and most recent Dakar was a twentieth in Rally2 in 2023; at 32 years of age, he is the youngest person to hit the ten-start benchmark, which classifies him as a “Dakar Legend”.

Beto Verber will oversee Cabrera’s #745X team as lead mechanic and manager. Verber has over three decades of SCORE and desert experience, including a seven-year stretch riding for Kawasaki Team Green from 1990 to 1996. Other team members include Carlos Valenzuela,
Mauricio Hernadez, and Cabrera’s father Patricio Cabrera Sr.

The team marks Kawasaki’s return to providing factory-level bike support in desert racing, a welcome change of pace after mainly focusing on doing so for UTVs. The Japanese manufacturer has won the Baja 500 motorcycle overall eleven times along with ten Baja 1000s, the most recent coming in 2014 with this year’s Dakar winner Ricky Brabec as lead rider.

The 2024 Baja 1000 will close out the season on 15 November.