Off-road anyone?

I'm going to take part in my first ever off-road trial competition this coming weekend and thought I'd ask whether there are any other off-roaders in the forum.

So far I've only attended competitions as a spectator or a mechanic, but this weekend a friend of mine asked me to go as his co-driver, because his regular co-driver has to work through the weekend.

For those who do not know what off-road trial is about : You drive a 4X4 car through a pre-set (minimum 4 m wide, between 10 and 500 m long) course of either woodland, swamp, rock, hill-climbing or mud as cleanly as possible. You get fault points for stopping the car, backing up, touching a track marker or taking too long to complete the course. On some (more difficult) courses there are also ports marked with the amount of points you get if you can not reach the marker. There are 10 courses / race and the winner is the pair who makes it through with the least points. It is more or less the same as trial on motorcycles, actually.

The competition this weekend is mostly on rocky terrain, so it is more a test of skill, durability and dexterity than of raw engine power (like mud or hill climbing). The race is a part of the national championship cup, so we should face some rather skilled opponents too...

We're going in with a slightly modified Suzuki SJ410, which should be more or less ideal for a race of this kind. The car has shortened gear ratios, wide (low pressure) tyres and some small suspension mods, but is still legal for Standard class.

I'm actually bloody excited about going! Hope I do not mess up at some point and destroy my friends chances of scoring championship points.

I went off roading once

my favorite part is when the truck went to a 40 degree hill side and it felt like it would roll over

It is one of the few motorpsorts where you can be scared at less than 20 km/h.

The race was fun while it lasted... had to drop out after the first stage because the cars fuel system got clogged and the engine kept stalling. We did what we could to clear the pipes, but without a reliable engine there's no point in going rock climbing in a car without a rollcage. Both of us wanted to keep all major appendages attached to our torsos, so we decided to call it quits.

In october I'm going to take part in Warn trophy, a 24 hour endurance/orienteering competition for off-road vehicles as a member of a 3 (possibly 4) man team, so I've got 3 months to get myself into some resemblance of shape (and in this case round is not really a good shape).