As Akashra & Grover mentioned, an XCO series would be fantastic.
However, I can already hear people whinging about the long distances travelled for not a lot of saddle time.
It will be impossible to please the masses, no matter how hard organisers try!
I think the answer to this is to combine travel so races are back-to-back over multiple days, or offering multiple events within the same day.
I'm currently toying with some ideas for events - for the State Series we were looking at doing things like Bendigo Saturday Castlemaine or Redesdale Sunday, or Lake Mountain Saturday, Buxton Sunday - things like that.
Something else I'm looking at are events where we might have XCO at 10am, and some other form of event in the afternoon. Could be a 3hr, could be XCT; could be another XCO - maybe you reverse the course from what you just rode. You're spot on though - the argument is the travel to riding ratio.
We're also going to have a much harder problem to overcome in that noone these days wants to pre-enter. The unfortunately reality is I think it was our own event that really drove a nail in to that - we just got really unlucky with weather, and ended up in the unavoidable situation of a Marathon on a wet weekend that noone wanted to commit to in the conditions. If it does end up affecting things in 2014 - that people refuse to pre-enter events, I can see a lot of events being scaled back or cancelled in future, as it actually costs serious money to put on good events at some venues. $10 discounts for pre-entry just aren't going to cut it.
Maybe all the 3 hour racers should pair up and take on the 6
pairs racing really is fun, I hope it doesn't end.
IMO pairs racing can actually be harder than solo racing. Solo racing you pace yourself, but it's the rest between laps that really smashes you in pairs racing. You're expected to go all-out while on the track, rather than pacing yourself.