World Moto Clash has canceled its run-what-you-brung, $1 million-to-the-winner road race scheduled for Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in September.

“The investor we had been working with for months, based on clearly communicated terms, decided to take advantage of the circumstances and switched from being an investor to trying to take over the company on the cheap,” said Stanford W. Crane, founder and CEO of World Moto Clash, in a statement posted on its website.

“Not only was this unfair to our employee-shareholders, but it was a massive red-flag moment that told me, ‘These are not people we want to be in business with.’ I’ve been down this road before in my career, and it never ends well.

“So, I said, ‘No!’

“World Moto Clash was never created to put on one race. It was created to reimagine motorcycle road racing in the United States and to give riders, teams, sponsors, and fans the sport they deserve. WMC will keep moving forward and continue building on the work that brought us to this moment. We will not announce our next event until we have secured the funding needed to support the 2027 season the right way.”

World Moto Clash’s self-imposed deadline for depositing the promised $2.86 million prize purse in an escrow fund passed last week with organizers still looking for funding (which they previously said they already had). Initially slated for July at Utah Motorsports Campus, organizers moved the initial round of the event—billed as racing meets reality television programming—to Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course on the weekend of September 18-20. In an interview published on April 29 on roadracingworld.com, Crane said that the purse money would be in an escrow account 30 days prior to the event taking place.

The idea for the event was first floated nearly 20 years ago, with claims that it would draw wildly unique machines that would out-perform top-level racebikes because of the lack of technical restrictions. But this year was the first in which a specific date and venue was announced for the race. In April, organizers also announced a production and marketing team for the event.

But since then, WMC had tried to attract commitments from professional race teams and support organizations without success. With less than 30 days before the event was slated to start, there were no announcements of riders committed to participate, no teams, no vendors, no operations crew, and no announcements about any of the promised television programming actually being contracted for or shot.