This weekend’s Don River Dash 300 will have 100 car entries and almost 250 bikes for the gruelling off-road event near Bowen on the Whitsundays in North Queensland.

The event starts with a reverse grid format and is an endurance event where car and bike competitors race 25km upstream along the southern bed of the Don River. They navigate through a mixture of sand, rocks, and jumps before they return along the northern side of the riverbed six times over two days for a total of 300kms.

The event has been the brainchild of off-road racers Michael Marson and Talbot Cox. After they competed in the Baja in 2017, Talbot was flying over the Don River in a chopper and realised just how similar the dry riverbed was to a section of the Mexican track.

Together with fellow Burdekin Offroaders club committee members Dave and daughter Courtney Muir, they worked with other members to deliver the inaugural Don River Dash.

The inaugural event was held in 2019, where Billy Geddes and Jamie Ward in their Class 4 KRE Chev V8-powered Geiser Bros Trophy Truck while bike honours went to Seeton Battle. The next year, Cox with Craig King in the navigator’s seat of the Unlimited Class Toyota V8-powered Racer Engineering buggy. Toby Price won the bike section and also did half the event in the Geddes truck and finished second for the day.

Cox and King went back-to-back with victory in 2021, as Dean Ferris was the best of the bikes. In the most recent event last year, husband and wife Aaron and Liz Haby took their Unlimited Element Off Road Prodigy/Toyota V6 Turbo to a 23.6s victory over Geddes and Alan Cornick. In the bikes, Liam Walsh, who was second the previous year, won ahead of Callum Norton and Kodi Stephens.