well, the results may take some time to get so i can't post them .
The thunderbirds nite run was a fund raising event for the outback challenge attempt by Kym Bolton and Robert Marks held around the glass house mountains area last night [ 10-5-03 ].
We all met at around 4pm and i think there was 87 competitors in the end whick was twice what they expected.
The first truck was away at 5pm, we were near the end and got away over an hour later heading towards wamuran.
First casualty was a gu that pulled to the side of the road and dropped over a culvert, it was soon lifted out though.
Along this section we had to find the answer to some questions and there was people going left right and centre, doing "u" turns a few times and generally making the local residents think there was a UFO invasion with hundreds of spotlights lighting up the night sky
We finally aired down and hit the bush but some carnage in front of us on the access tracks to checkpoint 1 meant we didnt get there untill after 10 pm
there were dead trucks littering the countryside everywhere, CV's,popped beads,trailing arms,pinion shafts and just plain bogged trucks holding us up.
We eventually managed to thread our way through to checkpoint one, a hill they call "BIG RED"

Hmmmmm, Big Red the hill, last time i tried this was a year ago and i spent over half an our on it at the point of rolling on its side to finally get up so all the way along the access track i was thinking, " it wont be that track, surely they wont use that track, they wont be that mean to use that track, i hope they dont use that track " etc etc, but naturally that was the hill climb they call BIG RED i ended up parked at the bottom of.[ insert "scared" emotion here ].
There was a cut down 60 series ute with double lockers, V8, front and rear winches, 35 centipedes etc in front of me and i watched as he clawed his way sideways through the washouts at the bottom and then took the left turn at the rock ledges with a wheel soaring skywards as he dropped into the hole in front of the ledges, with V8 roaring he powered at the rocks and stopped dead....
With great care he reversed back and straightened up for an even bigger go and with wheels clawing for traction helplessly in the air he hit the ledges and popped the tyre off the rim...doh!
While he secured his truck and reseated the bead i had a chance to study the hill from the drivers seat, it was definately harder than last year, all the holes had washed out even deeper and the left turn at the top was a harder option than the right turn we had taken last year !
The sixty was finally back in action and with a straight run up at the ledges and with a couple of leaps into the air [looked like a gazelle ] he bounded over the rocks and up he went.
Well, can't be a woos so big red pointed Big Red at BIG RED and off we went for a carlength until the first washout and sideways we went but we kept forward motion up and with the rear LSD keeping at least the rear wheels biting we finally started to move forward with a bit of momentum over the next series of large ruts and washouts with the left front wheel dancing across the top due to the side angle we were on, The rock ledges appeared in front of us and the lights seemed to exaggerate the size of the holes in front of the ledges so in a last second decision i turned left before the largest section of the hole and pointed the truck at the worst bit of the rock ledges and slammed the throttle through the firewall, with wheels pawing the air, small sections of rock ledge spitting off into the distance and loose rock from the unused sction of track above the rock ledge getting thrown back towards the bottom of the hill we powered our way to the top, woooooo hooooo.
We collected our points and headed for the lookout for the food break with the elation slowly starting to calm back down as we took in the view while enjoying the sausage sizzle and coffee.

By this time it was around midnight so we headed of to do the second half of the run, first up was an easy drive to the new track they had found [was a bike track], there was no one at the spot marked on our notes so we turned left and meandered up the loose dirt climb thinking that checkpoint 4 must be up ahead, we were having a hard time getting up and i was thinking the challenge part must be bad, we slowly made our way around a dog leg in the track to be confronted with a deeply rutted section and a sea of faces peering down at us, with no time to plan or build up a bit of momentum we soon came to a stop with the diffs dragging.
we reversed back but were way off line so when we tried again we had to stop with the front left wheel threatening to throw itself over the back right hand corner of the truck, and taking the rest of the truck with it.
We carefully reversed back for another go and with a better line up and as much momentum as we could get in half a car length, we headed upwards but hit a big rock which washed off our momentum and we stopped again.
With all points now lost we backed down and hit it again and just managed to claw our way to the top.

Next up we drove some muddy rainforest tracks and finally ended up at checkpoint 3, "locker lane"
the blokes on the checkpoint said "you've got front and rear lockers havn't you? " implying that you weren't allowed to tackle this checkpoint without them, we admitted we didn't have any lockers and they were not real keen to let us continue pointing out that heaps of trucks had had problems that night.
The big red racing team charm must have worked [there was not many trucks left to finish either] because they let us go with some doubtfull looks.
We had heard that the big holes on top of the rockface were huge and everyone was slamming their chassis ,sills and diffs on the top edge of the rockface so we took the far left line over the jutting out rocks and went straight up and over the rockface but then stopped with one front wheel spinning uselessly obove the big holes, we reversed left hand down partly over the ledge [ with my view out my window being a long drop straight down the rockface we had just driven up] and went forward again to try and shuffle the front across to the right so i could get the front wheels to reach the ground again and we finally managed to make the top.
They asked a question and wrote down the answer but didnt write anything in the points section as we found out later so i dont know how many points we got there.

We followed the trek notes to ball bearing hill but mine wont fit through the dogleg so we drove up and over the large rock jutting out from the right before getting back on the main dirt road to the top of "ho che min trail" [so named due to the large amount of slopes on it]...[ dont blame me, i didn't name it ] we skirted the edge and dropped into the rainforest , skirted some new plantations with people going in all directions due to one intersection missing on the trek notes .
we figured they must have missed one so we continued on and took a left turn into a rather overgrown muddy track and ended up part way along the access track to ho che min trail but apparently the track we were on was only made that night!! we were in the right place anyway so it didn't matter.
We watched as a few vehicles were winched and towed through the large mud filled gully in front of us, several vehicles turned back so with all the shuffling around vic ended up in front of us and tackled the gully first.
With a bit of momentum and power he made it through the mud but got trapped in the left wheel rut as it went up the bank, several tries later he tried to winch up but the extreme side slope meant that he ran out of diesel so we tied up to a tree and winched him back down the hill to level ground where he pumped up the fuel and restarted his truck, we then had a very hard winch to drag him back through the deep sticky mud and back up the bank, at least i now know the modifications i made to the Nissan bullbar to mount the high mount winch have worked beautifully .
We then proceeded around that section and dropped back in to the bottom of ho chi min trail which is checkpoint 2
We started up this deep rutted side sloped track and promptly had the right hand side rails sliding along the downhill side bank as the left wheels left the ground, i steered into and partway up the right hand bank and we kept on up the trail with the siderails hitting the bank several times on the way up and the left front wheel in the air more times than it was on the ground
We made the top and got our points then drove back to the lookout to hand in our sheet to finish.
It was a great night once we got past the early carnage on the easier sections.
Can't wait for the next one

just got the results,there was 96 competitors, we came third
Andy and di came third in the easy run.
My mate vic came 11th but was too late to do section 4 but i reckon he would have driven it [double locked GQ with turbo and 6" lift ] so he would have been equal third.
shane
oh yeh, did i mention WOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOO

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