Having always fancied my chances, I’m now dead certain I’m not all that cut out for competitive off-road driving after all. This revelation dawned upon me while in attendance of the penultimate round of Spirit of Africa Trophy eliminations in Kosi Bay last week.By Kyle Kock
I could handle the 5 hour drive to Kosi Bay from Durban International Airport, the sheer discomfort of a thin foam mattress, sleeping bag and near freezing temperatures outside my two-man tent, and the awkward fumbling about for my cellular phone so I could use its dim backlight to find my facecloth pre-dawn, but having survived the horrors of no hot water and electricity after 22h00 and before 06h00 is no mean feat you’ll agree.
There was no error in my eager anticipation of my first Spirit of Africa TrophyBut get off on the wrong foot I did, as the very first challenge for the day, a regularity rally run no longer than 1,4 km, was botched by me reading out the wrong directions to my teammate, Mark Holdsworth, – who having heard that we were “a few hundred metres out”, immediately dropped the anchors on our Triton 2,5 DI-D, performed an about-turn in the – and promptly got a scolding from one of the marshals who accused him of “driving over trees” in his desperation to find the correct sand trail.
Having decided that I’d make a better driver than navigator, the next challenge saw me facing a wall of sand. “Now this is more like it.” I thought, as I told the marshal to line our front axle up to the steepest pull away point (to score maximum points of course). There were two climbs I successfully maneuvered the number 10 Triton up, so we scored a maximum 100 points for that challenge.
With South African motorsports hero Sarel van der Merwe setting up the challenges and time limits to complete them in, the ideal times he set for the speed challenges were like “add-to-ego” – everyone was simply gunning for them. But it wasn’t all gung-ho. There were numerous marker poles set up along the sandy trails just to make sure we didn’t get too tail-happy (a 30 second penalty for knocking down one of these suckers), and the tyre pressures were drastically reduced all round. I only got to within about 15 seconds of Supervan’s time on my first speed test…
So most of the remaining speed tests were performed by my co-driver, while I tried (unsuccessfully) two climbs in-between – the first was a reverse exercise that Sarel looked so comfortable doing that he might as well have done it with his hands behind his head, with left foot on the wheel and right foot feathering the throttle.
After a thoroughly tiring 14 events, I had a go at the last speed challenge, and surprised myself by finishing within 8 seconds of the ideal time, but the last climb (this time a great big wall of sand track) had us all in awe as the summit just seemed unattainable – needless to say we didn’t make it up – but ol’ Supervan did it without breaking the lightest sweat.
I salute the 16 teams made up of hardcore fellows and the odd tough missus who made it to the finals – set to take place in Bilene, Mozambique from 21 to 29 August. The prize? R50 000 cash.