I thought I'd put together a trip report for this year's tour. Please note, I'm not going to mention specific tracks or forests. If you know these tracks, please keep it to yourself. I'm not trying to "save" these tracks for us or anything like that - they're all fairly well known areas, but I'd rather not be specific.
Some background.
A small group of us started the annual Adventure Tour in 2001, after the club decided not to run "Rhino trophy" anymore, which was a navigation event for the general public. We're a small club, and decided to do something for us rather than for everyone else. The first one ran at Easter, but four days of driving was determined to be one day too many, so it was shifted to Labour Day from 2002 onwards.
The premise has always been to run the hardest tracks we could find, and we've tried to find new areas to drive each year.
Originally the trip was open to any member, with advice on minimum equipment, but we have since developed a formula for minimum standards. It's the only trip each year that mandates equipment.
This trip is only open to financial members of the Victorian Suzuki club, and interstate visitors who pay a nominal fee to cover insurance.
For sierras, it's a measured 32" tyre minimum, twin lockers, and a roll bar is mandatory for soft tops, and strongly advised for hardtops. For larger cars (which are welcome, we just don't get many) the minimum tyre size increases to 35" and a winch is required
I wasn't able to get Piggles ready in time for this year, so I rode shotgun with Jon165 and dragged one of my cameras along to shoot some snaps.
For the camera nerds who are interested, I shot with my Nikon D4 and an old 18-35 F3.5-4.5 (its my designated "dirty" lens) I flashed pretty much every shot with as SB910 setup TTL to try and get some punch into the shots. All images were processed in Capture One 10.02
Yes, I did a clumsy job of knocking the number plates out.
Here's the cast of this years Tour
Leigh, club president, wasn't able to finish his junk in time either, so he passengered with Luke in "Blue" on it's last trip. Blue has completed 6 tours.
WT hardtop cut into a soft top
60 series axles with airlockers,
G16B Trimatic/6,5's
Range rover based coil suspension.
Jonno brought a Liz, a colleague from the US along and drove Day 1 in his drover, also a veteran of quite a few tours.
SWB Drover
WT axles/Doubletoughs
LPG G13A
5 speed
34" LTB's
Lockrights (I think)
RUF
Jon165 brought out his immaculate WT, I nabbed a seat in that mostly because Jon had the best tow car
WT SWB
G16B (Baleno) AW-4, 4.9 transfer, 4,6 diff,
Spool rear/airlocker front
Full float rear axle
255 85 16 Creepy's
Quinny ran is freshly SPUA'd SWB, with Emma passenger
SWB WT
LPG G16A/manualised AW-4, 6.5 transfer
Doubletough front, rear floater with "interesting" axles
34" JT2's
RUF
Phil dragged the underdog over for another Tour, With Gricey as his passenger
Maruti
Twin carbed G16B, 5 speed/6.5's
35" Silverstones
Vitara floater, double tough front Welded/welded
RUF
Cinders debuted the ex piranha off-road LWB, with Neo riding shotgun for two days
G16B
RUF
Airlocker/airlocker
6.5 transfer
255 85 16 KM2's
The start point was a couple of hours out of Melbourne, so it was quite an early start for us all. Not as early as for Gricey, Phil, Quinny and Emma, who found out it is possible to drop an AW-4 transmission and replace the flex plate in a truck stop, at 3AM. Ouch, but all things considered, we made it to the start point in a pretty timely fashion.
Some easy tracks to get everyone warmed up soon lead into a "nursery hill" - a steep little pinch that can cause havoc in the wet. This year it was bone dry and we all made pretty short work of it.
Cresting this little hill brought the first big climb of the day into view, and it's a monster. With two lines - really, really steep, and slightly less steep but off camber, it's one of those hills that has a fair pucker factor. Phil had a look at the steep line and (wisely, perhaps) called it after after giving it a pretty good crack, and then drove the "chicken" line, making a good showing until near the top, where all traction was lost and the winch was called on.
Cinders had a go at the easier line, but a (now) loose surface, unfamiliarity with the gearing, and too much tyre pressure saw him denied. Winch #2 for the morning to get Cinders back down off the hill.
Now it was Lukes turn. Luke had a pretty decent go at the "easy" line, but with every attempt the surface was just getting softer and softer. So he had a red hot go at the steep line. Carrying a fair bit of speed, the car was climbing well but as the front neared the steepest section of the track, it unweighted and the car slewed right, tapping a tree. This swung the front round hard, and with the left hand wheel also clipping the tree, it was unrecoverable - over it went. Very, very luckily, Lukes decent was caught by a a couple of trees after completing 1.5 rolls. Thanks to a very strong cage and harnesses, Luks was uninjured and attention turned to righting the sierra and working out if it was still a runner. Once on flat ground, it was determined the radiator had been punched into the fan and everyone set to pulling the clip back into shape and remounting the radiator well enough to get the car back to the trailer. Luke elected to head straight to the tow car, assess what needed to be done, and move on to camp, rather than continue with the rest of the trails for the day.
The rest of the group headed on to another steep climb, this one sports a diagonal ledge followed by very deep ruts. This climb proved to be super technical, with only Phil driving it without resorting to assistance of one form or another. However, it was the first real test of Quinny's "unusual" floater axles, and with some deft driving he was right on the edge of climbing the ledge when a bounce wiped out BOTH rear axles almost simultaneously. Things got awfully exciting as without the front and rear axles locked together, he didn't have enough brakes to hold the car, sending it careening to the bottom of the hill. We hastily swapped in a spare short side axle, but didn't realise the long side had gone too until Quinny tried to drive it out. We didn't have a long side spare, so we now had a very, very long winch to get it out. By which time we were really running out of time, with 170km of tarmac ahead of us to get to camp, we called it, leaving quite a few good tracks undriven.....
In front of us was a pretty decent road drive get most of the way to the location for Day 2. With some anxiety about fuel range, we did, ultimately make it to dinner by 9.30. Never before have lukewarm Parma’s been as appreciated. Camp was by the side of a track, where we lay listening to to the patter of rain on the tents most of the night
Day 2
Next morning we woke to grey skies, the clap of thunder, and wet roads, but arriving at the unloading spot, the weather was clear and there was little evidence of any local rain. Neo arrived with a spare radiator for Luke and a spare set of axles for Quinny, restoring him to 4WD. The conditions were a huge change from day 1 - with more grit and rocks, we now had ample traction, but line choice was far more important. we were soon picking our way through the rocks and ruts, getting hung up and generally enjoying the technical terrain.
This forest isn’t generally as steep, but there was plenty of opportunity for a bad line to halt progress, as Luke and Jon165 found on the very first track. Cinder’s car control was coming along in leaps and bounds, now down to 8 psi in the KM2’s, he was revelling in the traction and starting to really get a feel for both car and working with spotters. He was leaving plenty of yellow paint on the rocks form all that bar work though!
As we meandered though the forest we kept encountering little pinches and ledges to keep us on our toes, and the weird erosion pretty much saw epically deep ruts appear seemingly out of nowhere.
All was going very well though until Cinders wiped out a rear axle on a rutted, grippy climb. The only car on the trip running semifloat (and with plenty of weight on board) the traction of the KM2’s was definitely going to push the stock axles to the limit. Being semifloat though also meant a very different outcome - a very careful limp out of the forest followed by a tow truck to the night’s camp, where a spare was being lined up (Thanks Joshyboy26)
The rest of the group kept circulating, with only a few brief issues slowing us down - Jon165 burped an inside bead, and Phil had to improvise a bumpstop out of tape, cable ties and hope after one of his territory bumps disintegrated.
Then, at 3.57, we commenced the 4 O’clock track, and it was a doozy. Very steep, rutted and with plenty of rocks thrown it, it was everything this forest offered compressed into a couple of hundred metres of track. Phil was first up and it took maybe 30 minutes or so of rock stacking and some track work to get up. At least now we knew it was possible. Next up was Jon165, and with the smallest tyres of the group, a bit more effort was necessary, but he too, worked the car through with some rock stacking.
Leigh had taken the wheel of Quinny’s “zip tie” and put on a super impressive display, making very quick work of the hill indeed, just needing a couple of hits at the nasty tree roots up the top.
Now it was Luke’s turn. With the biggest tyres of the group, I think everyone pretty much leaves Luke to his own devices, thinking he’ll have little trouble, but those big 60 series pumpkins and his width really hurt on this hill. Luke was getting more and more aggressive, trying to bully the car through, but then wiped out a front CV. Now down to 3WD, he was still trying to get the diffs clear of the ruts when the engine fan chewed up the top radiator hose, ending his run.
Conceding defeat, we shortened the hose up and refilled the radiator, and Luke retreated. Still, 3 out of 4 isn’t bad, with no winching.
Once again, we were late loading up and made camp at my place in Kinglake by about 9.00pm, where Cinders and Neo had stripped the rear end of his car down, removed the broken axle, and were all prepped to pick up the replacement Monday morning.
Luke pulled his CV, only to find the inner axle trashed. so settled in to repairing a pin hole in his radiator and getting his front end back into shape for the last day’s driving. A well deserved shower, beer and pizza was just what the doctor ordered.
Day 3
The last day was organised at Bill’s block, We had grand plans of opening up about 50 metres of track so we could drive new gully, but between Luke scavenging a spare axle from a wreck on Bills block, and Neo swapping the new axle into Cinders car, we didn’t make the earliest start. We stuck to some of the plan though, which was to be a convoy drive of the block. Bills block weekends normally turn into a kind of free-for-all, with cars heading everywhere all at once, but our plan was to drive everything as a group, adding to the time taken to drive everything and therefore fill the day out. we needn’t have bothered. Plenty of harmless on-our-side fun was being had on the first track, and in high spirits, we all looped around to drop in to the gullies heading down. Everything was going really swimmingly - Phil was loving being somewhere that wasn’t scary steep, track conditions were ace, it was all happy times…. suspiciously happy times. something HAD to go wrong.
And it did. Phil Jammed his car up and broke the front diff. In a pretty tight spot to get to. Then Emma, who had been doing an aersome job driving Ziptie, bent the front on a tree stump, putting the fan into the crank pulley. So we now had three cars wedged in a gully and two broken. Jon’s jack took care of Ziptie, so that got moving again, allowing us to drag Phil out of the spot he was in and back out the entry. This allowed the rest of os to continue up past where Phil had broken. This pinch hadn’t claimed it’s last victim though, as it then wiped out a front CV in Cinder’s LWB.
With two cars down and a tired crew rapidly running out of motivation, we pretty much called it a day by around three, with time for some group shots.
Whilst there were lots of breakages this year and lots of recovery ( we’ve done some years without even getting a strap out) It was a cracker of a tour. The road KM’s were high this year, but it was cool to drive some stuff we hadn’t toured on before. Hopefully we get some more fresh builds next year, because there’s nothing like troubleshooting a build on Tour!
