I had arrived back from cape york to find the rear LSD had shattered a clutch plate and the pins on the bottom of the front shocks were damaged so it was a bit of a rush to fit an ARB airlocker to the rear and weld some eyes to the front shocks so that "pin to eye adaptors" could be used.

Brent from Wizard Performance waved his magic wand and the truck was ready to compete but my dodgey wiring was to let us down later on.

Rain had made things very slippery and we lined up for track one and watched as the mud got dragged up onto the rocks in the creek bed...looks like fun.

Our turn finally came and Alben Perret snuck in front of us and promptly slid straight down the entry to the creek bed and got himself stuck , he he!!

It gave us a perfect opportunity for some good natured stirring !

We finally started down the entry and managed to angle across to the start of the gorge section but didn't make it up the rock ledges on the exit so chris threw a few rocks around and we finally dragged ourselves out of the gorge and into the big boulders of the bend, again chris had to do a fair bit of rock stacking as we couldn't get traction but we finally managed to drive out of boulder bend and up the exit to finish with a score of 185...thats 18th  out of about 30 competitors [i think].

We next lined up for track three which was on loose dirt and large rocks on the side of a hill but a roll over by a nissan ute caused a bit of a back log as both track three and track two started from the same point, the nissan was finally cleared and we were ready to go.

The start was a bad side slope with the tyres digging into the loose black soil and making it even worse, the rear locker was wired to be on all the time and tended to push us straight ahead when we should have been turning sharp left up the hill and we had to have a couple of goes to get round the corner.

We started up the hill but got stuck with the diffs dragging on the rocks, some rock stacking got us going again until we tried to get past the huge rock about half way up the hill.

We had several goes at trying to get round the rock but ended up breaking a large section of the rock off  [ these nissans sure are tough ! ] and finally got past this section and promptly got stuck on a big rock in the centre of the track.

Again chris rock stacked and we were moving again but as the rear wheels were about to pass the finish line we got stuck again...doh.

It didn't matter what chris tried, we were getting nowhere and had to winch off the rocks to finish with a score of 250 points to come in 21st.

It was getting on dark so we headed back to camp for dinner and then lined up at  Glens Gully where they had the whole place lit up so we could tackle the slippery mud of the man made track.

The rain was playing havoc with the scoring so no one lost any points and we all had fun putting on a bit of a show for the crowd, lots of sideways action !!

The "dogs bowl" section had to be rerouted as the bottom of it got deeply dug out  by a few of the cars that went first and  finally it got so bad that no one could get out.

Sunday dawned fine so we headed over to track two for our go, the track went down hill to a very sharp right hand corner which had most doing a three point turn and then squeezing between a stump and a large rock, it didn't matter what angle we took the GU just did not fit.

We tried to drive over the stump but finally got through by driving over the large rock on the uphill side, talk about a bad side angle, i was certainly glad to get past that section but it had cost us 80 points that no one else had aqquired.

We continued on to the next hard bit where we planned our assault on the large rock pile with the large log across the top for good measure.

I had planned to drive up with a little bit of momentum and as the rear wheels hit the rocks i would accellerate and with the rear difflock on it would lift the front over the log and rocks and we should pretty much clear the obstacle and gain us some points.

Things were going to plan but the difflock wasn't on [due to a corroded solenoid plug] and when it should have accellerated and surged forward, it instead just went up and came down right on the top of the rocks with a huge bang, there was a huge "ooooh"

from the crowd and lots of spectators rushed over to see what had happened.

The damage wasn't bad but i had to replace the side step mounts and sill protector later on and the sill copped a bit more of a pounding.

We were well and truly high centred but were far enough over to only cop one winching penalty as we dragged the truck off and finished with a score of 110 points to come in 8th.

Funny how our best run was with open diffs :>)

We then headed back to Glens Gully for the "vertical assault" competition and made the first hill with no worries but afer watching a couple of trucks hit the tree on the left hand side even though they had double difflocks i decided i liked the left hand side of the truck just the way it is and opted out as it wasn't part of the competition.

We finished the weekend in 9th place with a score of 545 points which wasn't too bad but the main thing is we had a lot of fun and we are looking forward to the next one

Shane Gerrish (AKA Big Red)

:: Return to Comp Reports / Home

© Copyright 2003 Big Red Racing, All Rights Reserved
http://www.bigred4x4.com