Mugen will race with his electric Dirtbike in the new fim E-Xplorer World Cup series. Mugen rides in the new series under the name M-TEC and is perhaps an electric racing outfit that we had almost forgotten, because the Japanese tuning house was no longer on the track with its Shinden Electric Superbike since 2019, when The Isle of Man TT canceled its electric race. While the various iterations of Mugen Shinden’s Electric Superbike made headlines with their NON-STOP race victories at the TT, it was the company’s fascinating Dirtbike concept that surprised at its debut.
The package, called Mugen E. Rex Dirtbike, looked competent and ready to race when it was unveiled. But what made the Mugen E. Rex very interesting for us was the fact that Honda had copied the machine with carbon for its own Honda CR electric concept.
The links between Honda and Mugen are of course very close, which only aroused our appetite for this electric DiRT Ripper to drive furiously on an MX course.
And now it seems that we will see the Mugen E. Rex still in action, with the FIM E-Xplorer World Cup scheduled to start after this year, and with Mugen as the official manufacturer of the series. The E-Xplorer series has not yet designed a schedule or announced a number of venues, but we know that it will include urban and outdoor fields with ten teams of two (with a male driver and a female driver each).
The world championship, called a kind of Formula E Cyclocross, hopes to encourage more electric Action in the off-road field, and a big piece of this puzzle brings a company like Mugen on board.
“We are very pleased to be registered as the official manufacturer of the fim E-Xplorer World Cup,” said Satoshi Katsumata, General Manager of M-TEC.
“We are convinced that this race will be the best place for us to apply the know-how that we have acquired thanks to our participation in the TT-Zero class of the Isle of Man and the evolution of the EV-MX e-REX bike and to continue to challenge ourselves.” We are looking forward to finally having the opportunity to see the Mugen E. Rex in action (especially in its recent Version) and hope that it will inspire other major manufacturers to become aware of it.