Viewed as one of the most difficult endurance rallies on the planet, the 3,720 km Silverstone 4x4 Rally of Asia offers a unique challenge to competitors. Not only do they have to contend with racing along open public tracks, goat tracks and narrow roads at break-neck speeds up to 160 km/h, but the event takes place in August - the hottest and most unpleasant time of year for weather in South East Asia.
Russell Palmer and Malcolm Crockenberg sealed a convincing victory in the 2001 rally after leading the gruelling nine-day endurance event across Malaysia and Southern Thailand from the first competitive day. Their victory also marked a superb result for Team Suzuki Australia New Zealand, which claimed the top three placings on the region's toughest motorsport event.
"It's quite a physical and mental challenge," said event winner Palmer. "You never know what is around the next corner. On a conventional world championship race like Rally Australia, you know that the road would be closed to other traffic and you can drive flat out, safe in the knowledge that nothing is coming the other way.
"But this is different. There is that uncertainty of being on the wrong side of flat out through a village or around a blind corner and you might come face to face with a chicken, a monkey, a monitor lizard, a moped, a snake - even another car. That makes it a real challenge.
"There's even the risk of meeting a wild tiger or an elephant in parts of Malaysia or Thailand. That would have been very interesting. We saw plenty of wild monkeys, many mopeds and some stray dogs in the villages, but were lucky not to hit anything. It's a case of being observant, careful not to be too heavy on the brakes and to take each corner as if it's your last!"
But, according to fellow Australian Ross Dunkerton, who along with co-driver Alan Stean claimed the fastest time on the final 21km high speed special stage through sugar cane fields and rubber plantations - north of Penang Island - the event is a 'real hoot'.
"It's bloody tiring out there," says Ross. "The stages aren't too long by endurance rally standards, but we were very lucky this year. They are tough on the car and even tougher on the body. I can't imagine what those rutted roads would have been like if it had rained. Apparently it rained in 1999 and the roads were like quagmires - very difficult even for 4x4s. But we proved that it is possible to take a near-standard Suzuki out into the middle of nowhere and get it to the finish in second place. You have to look after the car as well as yourselves.
"We had several really scary moments this year. I was coming around this fast corner and there was a moped and rider in the road. He saw us coming and Alan and I could see the 'whites of his eyes' and this look of terror on his face. There was no contact and no injury, but I looked in the rear view and there was this moped rider heading off into the ditch - doing his Mick Doohan impression!"
New Zealander Grant Aitken and his Malaysian co-driver NG Pui Choon finished third in the last of the Grand Vitaras this year, despite losing several minutes in Thailand when they lost their way in the road book through narrow village tracks, north of Phuket.
"You have to get used to the heat out there," said Aitken, who spends six months of his year organising the Race To The Sky in South Island, New Zealand. "I've been coming to this event for a few years, but it's the heat which gets to you. Back home it's winter at the moment and we've got snow in Queenstown. It was 43 degrees on the Malaysia-Thailand border and that's bloody hot when the humidity is so high. T-shirts don't last five minutes out there before you can wring them out.
"The problem is you cannot run with the air conditioning on at all. That saps power from the engine, slows you down and puts a drain on everything. You just have to sweat and drink as many fluids as possible. We all like a good drink back at the bar in the evenings normally, but you have to be careful on rallies like this, because dehydration sets in very quickly. If you are not passing urine at least two or three times a day, then you are not drinking enough water!"
But for Palmer it was a fantastic win. "I suppose I can have a good smile now," admitted the Kuala Lumpur-based driver at the finish. "Rallying is never over until it's over, but it's been a great result for me, for the Suzuki team and for my co-driver Malcolm. The car was fantastic and could probably go out there again and do another event tomorrow. We had a couple of scares with differential problems and some bolts working loose on the front struts on Ross's car, but nothing too serious. I was mindful that the differential was not too strong and was occasionally switching into four-wheel drive to conserve it."
Runner-up Dunkerton enjoyed his foray into the jungle: "I hadn't competed in Malaysia for seven years," he confessed. "But I've had a good track record here in the past, when I drove a Mitsubishi Galant VR-4 for the factory team on special stage rallies. It was just so frustrating to lose time on the first couple of days when there were a couple of ambiguous arrows on the stages and we went wrong on both occasions and lost a lot of time.
"That's where Russell gained that early advantage and then it just wasn't worth pushing and wrecking the car. We were always playing catch up after that and hoping that he would have a problem. We were driving at around 70%, but there was still time for a very close shave with a moped rider who hadn't heeded the warnings that there was a motor rally passing through a village. Fortunately no-one was injured."
Delays over the earlier sections in Southern Malaysia cost Thailand's Chusak Tussanviriyaku any chance of taking victory, but the Mazda driver set several fastest stage times in his native Thailand and ultimately finished fourth overall, a little under four minutes ahead of the defending champion Vivat Aieolek, himself delayed by punctures on the earlier sections and by an accident in the oil palm plantations, north of Johor Bahru.
Had it not been for the quick reactions of a New Zealand film crew in Thailand, he would not have even made the finish. A bridge collapsed moments before his Mazda arrived at the scene! Such are the perils of competing over these dangerous roads.
"We were filming on this stage, near Phuket Town, said Kiwi cameraman Malcolm Simes, and we noticed that this really old bridge looked a bit odd. It was then I noticed that a plank of wood had come astray and there was nothing to stop the next car falling into oblivion. We raced up to the bridge and flagged Chusak down before he got on the bridge. It kept him in the rally, but ruined a great TV shot for us. Can you imagine what would have happened? They would have needed a crane to hoist the car back on to the stage...!"
There were numerous niggling problems for other drivers, although the Thai pilot Thiraphong Rojanaviphah lost 45 minutes when his rear axle bedded itself down in the soft sand, near Kuantan, and he was towed back into the action to eventually finish 10th.
"I maybe went a bit too quickly over a ridge and landed quite heavily in some soft sand near the sea," admitted Thiraphong, driving a Mazda Fighter. "This meant we had no speed and the car began to bog down when I went forward. The rear axle went down into the sand and that was it. We tried to dig our way out, but there was no chance. We had to wait for a tow from an official car. If you get stuck over here and there's no one about - you've had it."
A broken driveshaft delayed the Japanese driver Maruhashi Norio's Suzuki Jimmy by eight minutes in the sixth stage, but he remarkably made the finish in the little 1300 car and managed to promote his Red Ribbon battle against AIDS in the process. "Maybe I super driver," quipped the Japanese in makeshift English.
The German Suzuki Jimmy entrant Joerg Muller was not so fortunate and retired on the run in to Kuala Terengganu with a blown engine, his American co-driver Kevin Earl Jones deciding to stay on and follow the event to its conclusion in Penang.
"We hit a tree and damaged the radiator," confessed the German. "But I thought that it might be okay to drive the next stage. I didn't realise that the car was smoking very badly and soon the engine seized. Even if we could have replaced the engine, the front suspension was too badly damaged to continue."
"This event started in 1996 and has built up gradually each year," said Joseph Wong, vice-chairman of the organising committee. "It is held under the patronage of our prime minister Dato Seri Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad and he has already suggested that next year's event should offer a new and challenging route through Eastern Malaysia, Sabah, Sarawak and through our neighbouring country Brunei. This is something we will look at in the future, but I'm sure this will happen in 2002."
Last year, the Millennium edition of the Silverstone 4x4 Rally of Asia started in Malaysia and headed north through Thailand and Myanmar (formerly Burma) to a finish across the border in the People's Republic of China.
Organised by Malaysian sports management company Autovention, on behalf of main sponsor Silverstone Tyres, the FIA-sanctioned event offered a total of 15 special stages in Western Malaysia and Southern Thailand this year. These were held on a mixture of oil palm and rubber plantation gravel tracks, high-speed loose surface roads through farming and jungle country and through sugar cane plantations.
Cars were flagged away from the Kuala Lumpur city centre start in front of a large crowd by General (R) Tan Sri Dato Zain Hashim, Chairman of the Lion Group. After an initial stopover in the town of Malacca - where they were greeted by the state's leading cabinet minister - this year's route headed south towards the intense humidity of Johor Bharu, close to the equatorial border with Singapore.
Four short off-road stages en route gave the international entry a taste of things to come, as the road books guided crews east and then north, teams eventually winding their way along the Western Malaysian's eastern coast, taking in additional overnight halts on the South China Sea at Kuantan and Kuala Terengganu.
After crossing into Thailand at the Golok border point after four days (the temperature was around 43 degrees C at the crossing) the competitive format changed, with short, relatively troublefree specials replaced by longer and more difficult all-terrain sections in Thailand, with overnight rest halts at Pattani, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Phuket Town and the country's second city Hat Yai. The final leg featured a tricky stage from Bukit Kayu Hitam to Chuping and then a run-in through the Muslim state of Kedah to the finish in Penang.
International teams from as far afield as New Zealand, Germany, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, the USA and Thailand took part in what has now become a traditional event in the Far East's 4x4 calendar and the only officially-sanctioned 4x4 event in the South East Asian region to run to FIA World Cup for Cross Country Rallies regulations.
http://www.autovention.com.my
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