How C S Santosh built India's first off-road riding school

A Dakar debut with nowhere to train

C S Santosh became the first Indian to compete in the Dakar Rally in 2015, and went on to finish the race three times, with his best result a 34th place in the bike category in 2018. Before any of that, he trained on his father's farmland in Kolar district, Karnataka, because there was no proper off-road riding school anywhere in India. What started as personal practice laps turned, in 2018, into BigRock Dirt Park, a fully incorporated training company on a ground of more than 20 acres near Huthur in Kolar.

That gap is the real story behind every off-road riding school an Indian rider can walk into today. Before BigRock, learning to ride properly in mud, sand and loose gravel meant going abroad, to places such as RawHyde Adventures in California, founded in 2003 and still training riders on its 2,500 acre property near Castaic, or finding a patch of waste land and working it out alone.

From one farm to a 20 acre school

BigRock's own account of its growth reads like a checklist of how an Indian motorsport business earns credibility. Red Bull signed on as a partner in 2019. KTM followed in 2020. Royal Enfield came on board in 2021. In 2024, Santosh's own team, BigRock Motorsports, won the first season of the Indian Supercross Racing League. The park says it has trained more than 10,000 riders since it began.

What the courses actually teach

BigRock's programme list runs from complete beginner to competition level. We Learn, Bedrock, TrailHeads and Boulder Weekend are entry level sessions for riders who have never taken a motorcycle off tarmac. She Rides is a women only batch. Adventure Levels 1 and 2 build the skills a Himalayan or GS rider needs on a loaded bike, while Dirt Training, Enduro and Slide School levels 1 and 2 are aimed at riders who want to race. There is also private coaching, open practice time and multi day Adventure Quest tours. Sessions on the park's own site are priced from about ₹2,500 to more than ₹15,000 depending on the course and its length.

How it measures against the world's schools

Set against the schools Indian riders are often told to look up to, BigRock is still young. Keith Code founded the California Superbike School in 1980, and its coaches have since trained more than 160,000 students at over 90 circuits in more than 25 countries, according to the school's own history page. RawHyde has had more than two decades to refine its adventure curriculum since 2003. BigRock's more than 10,000 riders and its run as a company since 2018 are a start, not a finish. But they mark the point where organised off-road training in India stopped depending on a plane ticket out of the country.

Sources

• BigRock Dirt Park: About Us
• BigRock Dirt Park: All Programmes
• C S Santosh, Wikipedia
• Discover C S Santosh's journey in supercross from racer to team owner, Red Bull
• RawHyde Adventures: Official BMW ADV Motorcycle Training and Tours
• California Superbike School: History