Musaios Extreme Adventure @ Buzau

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.

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.

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.