Tobias Ebster and ZX Moto: A New Chapter Starts at the Dakar 2027

Tobias Ebster is back on the Dakar entry list. The Austrian rally raid rider has signed a factory contract with ZX Moto and plans to line up at the Dakar 2027 on the brand new ZXMOTO 450 Rally, run by Joyride Race Service as the official factory team. For the young Chinese manufacturer it is a debut. For Tobi, it is the next chapter in one of the most remarkable stories in modern rally raid.

And for us at TimeOut Racing, it is personal. But first, the facts.

From Privateer to Factory Rider

If you want to explain to someone what determination looks like in motorsport, tell them the Tobias Ebster story.

A trained mechanical engineering technician from the Zillertal in Austria, Tobi financed his racing himself for years, working jobs on the side while training like a professional. He came from motocross and enduro, entered his first rally raid at the Hellas Rally, and finished second on debut. That was the warning shot.

In 2022 he won the FIM Bajas World Cup. Then came victory in the Rally2 class at the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, against riders with far bigger budgets and far longer CVs.

His Dakar debut in 2024 turned heads across the bivouac: winner of the Original by Motul category, the class for riders who race without any assistance and service their own bike every night, 20th overall, and Best Rookie. One year later he did something almost nobody predicted. At the Dakar 2025 he finished ninth overall as a privateer, the best placed private rider in the entire field, racing against full factory teams.

That result earned him a factory seat at Hero MotoSports in May 2025, a step we celebrated on this blog at the time. The Dakar 2026 should have been his breakthrough. Instead it lasted 14 kilometres. A crash on stage 3 left him with a broken scaphoid in his left hand, a helicopter flight back to the bivouac, and an early flight home for surgery. When Hero later restructured its rider line up, the contract was not renewed.

Some careers stall at that point. Tobi opened a Subway restaurant with his sister in July 2026 to put his everyday life on solid ground, and kept training. He was not done. He was waiting for the right project.

Who Is ZX Moto?

ZX Moto is a young Chinese motorcycle manufacturer founded by Zhang Xue, the entrepreneur behind Kove Moto, which he founded in 2017 and led to the Dakar Rally in 2023 before leaving the company in 2024. The new brand carries his initials, and with them his unfinished ambition: building a motorcycle that can win the Dakar.

The weapon for that ambition is the ZXMOTO 450 Rally, a rally raid machine presented at EICMA 2025 and developed specifically for cross country racing rather than adapted from an existing enduro. The racing operation is run by Joyride Race Service, which becomes the official ZX Moto factory rally team and handles technical development, logistics, strategy and the daily work on the bike.

The plan is deliberately staged. First comes the Rallye du Maroc in autumn 2026, part of the World Rally Raid Championship calendar, as a full dress rehearsal: racing kilometres for the new bike, real desert data, and time for Tobi, the engineers and Joyride to grow into one operation. Then, from 1 to 15 January, the main event: the Dakar 2027, the toughest possible proving ground for a brand new motorcycle.

It is an ambitious project, and that is exactly why it fits the rider. A machine with everything to prove, and a rider with everything to prove again.

How Is Rally Raid Different from a WRC Rally?

If you follow motorsport casually, rally raid and WRC rallying can look similar. Cars and bikes, dust, jumps. In reality they are two different sports.

A WRC rally is a sprint. Special stages are roughly 10 to 30 kilometres long, driven flat out on roads the crews have inspected beforehand and written down in pacenotes. The navigator reads those notes aloud, the driver reacts, and the whole event takes a weekend. Precision at maximum speed on a known route is the game.

Rally raid is an expedition against the clock. Stages run for hundreds of kilometres through open desert, and nobody has seen the route before the start. Navigation happens from a roadbook that competitors receive shortly before the stage, and on a bike there is no navigator: the rider reads the roadbook, picks the line through the dunes and manages the machine, all at once, alone, for up to two weeks. Add extreme heat, fuel management, marathon stages without service, and the bivouac as a moving home, and you understand why finishing the Dakar is an achievement in itself.

That solitude is what makes bike riders like Tobi special. Out there, nobody helps you decide.

More Than a Bivouac Acquaintance

Now the personal part.

We first met Tobi at the Dakar 2024, his rookie year, when he was still wrenching on his own bike every night in the Original by Motul area while we looked after our clients a few tents away. What started as a casual bivouac chat grew, edition by edition, into a genuine connection built on mutual respect and mutual support. We are not claiming to be his inner circle, and we do not need to be. Rally raid friendships work differently: you share information, you lend a hand, you genuinely want the other one to make it.

Which is why the news of his Hero exit stung, and why this announcement makes us smile. TimeOut Racing will be at the Dakar 2027 with our own crews, in the same bivouac, and we will get to watch this comeback from the closest possible distance. There are results we follow professionally, and there are results we cheer for personally. Tobi on the ZXMOTO 450 Rally is firmly in the second category.

You can follow his road to the Dakar on Instagram at tobias_ebster96.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tobias Ebster?

Tobias Ebster is an Austrian rally raid rider from the Zillertal. He won the FIM Bajas World Cup in 2022, the Original by Motul category at the Dakar 2024 as Best Rookie, and finished ninth overall at the Dakar 2025 as the best privateer, before riding as a factory rider for Hero MotoSports.

What is ZX Moto?

ZX Moto is a young Chinese motorcycle manufacturer founded by Zhang Xue, who previously founded Kove Moto and brought it to the Dakar in 2023. Its rally raid machine is the ZXMOTO 450 Rally, presented at EICMA 2025, with Joyride Race Service running the official factory rally team.

What will Tobias Ebster ride at the Dakar 2027?

He plans to race the new ZXMOTO 450 Rally as a ZX Moto factory rider, with the Rallye du Maroc in autumn 2026 serving as the test event before the Dakar debut.

When does the Dakar 2027 take place?

The Dakar 2027 runs from 1 to 15 January 2027 in Saudi Arabia, starting and finishing at King Abdullah Economic City.

TimeOut Racing supports private crews at the Dakar and Dakar Classic. We will be at the Dakar 2027, and we will be watching one particular ZX Moto very closely. Planning your own entry? Talk to us.

About the Author

Sven Syfrig is the founder and Team Principal of TimeOut Racing, a Swiss rally raid assistance team based in Wollerau, Switzerland. Founded in 2014, the team has supported private crews at the Dakar and Dakar Classic every year since 2022, including five crews at the Dakar Classic 2026, with more than 660 mechanic hours spent under clients' cars in the bivouac. Sven writes from the place most reports never reach: the bivouac at three in the morning.