Hero MotoSports is racing the final days of the 2026 Rallye du Maroc without Ross Branch, its reigning world champion, after a training crash ruled him out before the rally even began. In his place, 18-year-old Shlok Ghorpade, who joined Hero only four months ago, is lining up in his first World Rally-Raid Championship (W2RC) round, a story that started when The Spec’d covered Hero signing him in August.
The Rallye du Maroc runs from Agadir to Zagora between September 28 and October 3, 2026, the fourth of five rounds in the W2RC, the joint FIA and FIM championship that also stages the Dakar Rally. Hero MotoSports remains the only Indian team competing in it.
Why Ross Branch Isn’t Racing
Branch, the 2024 W2RC champion and the rider Hero built its entire rally programme around, crashed in training in the days before the event and will miss it completely. Hero confirmed on September 23 that he has begun rehabilitation and is targeting a comeback in 2027, not a return later this season. For a team that has won exactly one world title in ten years of trying, losing its headline rider for a points round this late in the calendar is a real setback, not a footnote.
Who Is Racing Instead
Shlok Ghorpade isn’t a direct replacement for Branch’s factory-class entry, Hero still fields Jose Ignacio “Nacho” Cornejo in the top RallyGP class this week. But Ghorpade’s presence at all is the actual story. He is the first graduate of Hero’s “India’s Next Dakar Hero” programme, launched in June 2026 alongside a five-year extension of Hero’s partnership with ASO, the organisation that runs the Dakar Rally. Before Hero, he spent two years racing motocross for KTM and collected seven Indian national titles in Supercross and Dirt Track.
| Rider | Class | Number | Prologue Result (Sept 28) |
| Nacho Cornejo | RallyGP | #11 | 13th |
| Michael Docherty | Rally2 | #14 | 7th |
| Shlok Ghorpade | Rally2 | #106 | 19th overall, 10th in class |
| Ross Branch | RallyGP | N/A | Did not start, injured |
How the Debut Actually Went
Rally2 is the class below RallyGP, built around production-derived rally bikes rather than full factory prototypes, and it’s where most of the grid, including every Indian rider in this story, actually races. In the 18 km Agadir prologue on September 28, Ghorpade finished 19th overall and 10th in Rally2, 1 minute 17 seconds behind prologue winner Daniel Sanders of the factory Red Bull KTM team, according to Motoroids’ reporting from the event. “The opening stage was a valuable learning experience,” Ghorpade said afterward, pointing to how tightly spaced the route notes were as the biggest adjustment from national-level racing.
The rally runs through October 3 and final standings were not out at the time of writing, so treat the prologue as a first data point on Ghorpade, not a verdict on his week. No independent stage-by-stage result for him beyond the prologue had been published by the time this went up.
A rookie 10th in Rally2 on a world championship debut is a solid start, not proof of anything yet. The real test is whether Ghorpade is still inside the top 15 when the rally reaches Zagora on October 3.
Hero Isn’t the Only Indian Team in Morocco
Sherco TVS Factory Rally has Harith Noah entered in Rally2 too, under car number 20. Noah already has a senior result to his name: a Rally2 class win at the 2024 Dakar Rally that made him the fastest Indian finisher in Dakar history. That puts two separate Indian-backed Rally2 entries on the same start list this week, Hero’s rookie and TVS’s most proven rally racer, a depth of participation that simply didn’t exist three years ago.
| Team | Rider | Class | Background |
| Sherco TVS Factory Rally | Harith Noah (#20) | Rally2 | 2024 Dakar Rally2 class winner |
| Hero MotoSports | Michael Docherty (#14) | Rally2 | Experienced team rider, 7th in prologue |
| Hero MotoSports | Shlok Ghorpade (#106) | Rally2 | 18, W2RC debutant, ex-KTM motocross |
Why This Matters Beyond One Rally
Hero MotoCorp, India’s largest two-wheeler maker by volume, has run this rally team for a decade specifically to prove its engineering on the world’s hardest terrain and feed that back into showroom products. Its closest road-going equivalent, the Xpulse 210, borrows its adventure-touring identity from exactly this programme, and sits in the same adventure-bike category buyers cross-shop against Royal Enfield’s Himalayan. A development rider who can actually finish inside the top half of a world championship class is worth more to that long-term story than one more podium for an already-proven champion, which is presumably why Hero is still sending Ghorpade to Morocco even with its title defence compromised.
Is Ross Branch out for the rest of the 2026 season?
Hero MotoSports has only confirmed he will miss the Rallye du Maroc. The team says he is focused on recovery and a 2027 return, which leaves open the possibility he skips the season’s final W2RC round too, though nothing beyond Morocco has been officially ruled out.
What is the difference between RallyGP and Rally2 in the World Rally-Raid Championship?
RallyGP is the top class for factory prototype rally bikes built specifically for the discipline, raced by riders like Branch and prologue winner Daniel Sanders. Rally2 is for production-derived rally bikes and is where the bulk of the grid, including every Indian rider in this story, actually competes.
Where can I follow live Rallye du Maroc 2026 results?
Stage-by-stage timing for the rally is published on the World Rally-Raid Championship’s own live tracking site as each stage finishes, through the event’s final stage on October 3.
