Musaios Extreme Adventure @ Buzau

September 6. - 9. 2007

This weekend the town of Buzau, a small mountain settlement in Romania was home to the one of the last major off road contests for this year. As most of the competitions here, this one emphasized very strongly on navigation skills of the copilot, pilot's driving skills as well as a good relationship between the two members.

 

 

Late Thursday night the central plaza, which was surrounded by an orange plastic fence, started to fill up with off road cars, assistance cars, motorbikes and ATV's. Since the Musaios competition has sections for almost everything with an engine divided according to the difficulty, in this second year of competition many amateurs turned up with an ATV, car or motorbike to try their luck.

 

With little delay, the next morning engines started to roar in the improvised parking lot. Bike engines, loud and high, 3.0 petrols, 4,2 diesels and 5,7 hemi's fired up for the race to come. The briefing, as well as everything involving the raced highlighted what off road is all about: having fun, being safe, keeping people around you and your car safe, reason for which a 200 point penalty was imposed for speeding on the parts of the rally that were on national roads, and last but not least, friendship.

Everybody rushed to their vehicles and left the main starting point with the smell of burning rubber, in a rush to get to the official starting point, get their terratrips reset and charge into the woods.

 

 

First day of contest seemed fairly easy with one minor problem. The Open and Extreme categories for cars had a special stage which one of the cars missed. This caused a stir which finally led to the whole special stage being annulled and cars being informed to jump it and continue the rally raid stage. There was no rain in the first day so very few cars used winches, relying solely on the second gear in high to attack difficult climbs or trees that have fallen and have been left on the track.

In the improvised camp at the end of day one, I found the time to inspect all the cars and gather information. Most cars parked there were sacred off road monsters. I saw Toyota's model 70, quite plenty, which had great timing for the day, with the exception of one 70 which rolled over and seemed unable to continue at the end of day one. Also scattered around were what seemed to have been a few Landys 90 and were now 4,0 diesels with 70 or 80's axles. None the less excellent runners. To be added to the list plenty of Mercedes' famous G Klasse, some broken, some bent, some… very extremely cut and dent to fit Simex 35's and various types of rollcages.

The star of the show was what used to be a Jeep Wrangler. As I approached it I noticed something interesting which firstly seemed to be an unusually high lifting kit but at a closer inspection turned out to be a pair of Unimog axles fitted for the 5,7 hemi I mentioned earlier. 1…2…..6 reducing gears on one chassis. Excellent rollcage, front and rear heavy duty suspensions, front and rear winches and so on. Everything you may need on an off road vehicle. Ironically they announced that they retired from the race due to the fact that they rolled over and broken a Landy's radiator in the process.

 

Second day announced itself to be a harder one as clouds gathered informing us that we might be seeing a little bit of British weather later in the day. Everybody without a hangover was already checking out the vehicles, making last minute adjustments, or just savoring their morning coffee.

 

The race started and so the competitors left for the second day of race, in the Forrest. Compared to the first day where most of the distances were over 500 yards, today's roadbook was created with the sole purpose of testing the team's navigation skills. There were also some zones where one could switch to fifth gear and speed up, but most zones implied fast reset of the terratrips, fast abilities to read and understand the roadbooks and faster abilities to inform the pilot of his next turn.

As promised, rain started to fall around 2 o'clock and the Open section turned Extreme. In only two hours the casualties were 4 bent Panhard rods, about a dozen cut, exploded or otherwise flat tires and a handful of cars stuck in clay. By four o'clock all the cars in the Extreme section were out on the open road. The organizers announced that the race is to be stopped due to bad weather and a decision is to be taken regarding the competition. Back in Buzau, cars kept coming the whole night as rain poured down on to the course. The last cars arrived in the mornings and drivers described a wonderful night slept in the cold rain with the car stuck in a place where even the GPS would get lost.

 

Finally the third and final day came, bringing along a special stage which emphasized pilot's driving skills exclusively. Motorbikes, ATV's and cars raced across the 1,5 mile track to get the fastest time and title for best performance. With the support of the local police and city hall, this year's contest turned out to be a big plus for off road fans all over as well as for the community which expect another competition of the same sort in the near future.