As we were about to leave Blindinje to head for Croatia a guy called Murco came up to us and said “Hey, what are you doing before you go to Croatia?” he then invited us to the Kozara National Park in Bosnia where he set us up in a Spa Hotel for the night and treated us to an evening of food an entertainment, what an amazing thing to do! We thought Blidinje was beautiful, and this place was nothing short of that… they also run the Kozara Trophy here in April… we are very, very tempted! This was a great way to relax a little before heading another 120km to the Croatia Challenge.
Day 1 - Prologue
Our digs in Croatia were just as nice, a lovely cabin with a fridge full of beer and a swimming pool! The only downside was the amount of mosquitos present. After settling in we began preparations for the Prologue later than afternoon.
We found that we had a creep on the steering, we were getting a lot less out than we were putting in and we wondered if we had caused some damage to the orbital after taking a big hit at Blidinje. The plan was to whip the orbital valve out so that we can strip it, and fit another one so we can get going on the Prologue.
There are some amazing cars and drivers in the line up including some Romanians that we know are going to be really hard to beat. Though saying that, good competition is what makes our blood pump and when we win at these kind of events we know that we have done well. We finished the Prologue in second position, just nine seconds off Sorca, the leader.
Day 2 – Stage 1 Road Book
The trails were amazing and fun but let’s be honest, we got our asses kicked! There was superb driving from the Romanians and our French friend Bonnefoi. The Romanians took a 45-minute lead on us which is huge, but why did this happen? Coming off of a win at Blidinje we should be on-point with our navigation, but every road book is different, it all depends on who puts it together, we just couldn’t get to grips with it. We pride ourselves on our navigation but it just wasn’t enough. This leaves us sitting in fifth position, not where we want to be, but Day 3 is the circuit race…
Day 3 – Circuit Race and Stage 2 Night Stage
The circuit race is in the woods, in a similar area to the Prologue course. It is all-natural terrain with extreme climbs and declines, with plenty of large obstacles to conquer. We won’t win much time on this stage; we just need to make sure that we don’t break stuff. We started with 7 cars at the start line running down to a single lane after about 100m. It was absolute chaos, there were winch cables going everywhere, cars driving over winch cables, winch cables going over cars and cars going over cars. It was almost like Ultra4 meets Trophy Raid, never before have we seen cars driving over live cables, pure madness! We gained some time but we were still about 12 minutes behind third and about 20 minutes behind second position.
The evening was the Night Stage, which includes a run through the forests and a deep ravine of mud. We were doing great on the stage, navigation on point, a good race pace, then we came to a tulip and it all went wrong… there were about 10 cars driving round lost because they had done some tree felling and therefore our exit no longer existed. We finished with a long mud run and had to winch 6-8 times to get through there and had to go slow as there was no way to get around the other cars. We lost a brake pipe towards the end of the stage and Jim made a mistake of pulling out of mud in 4th gear which burnt out the clutch. This meant a late night replacing the brake lines and replacing the clutch, with an early start in the morning for us to get back out racing again.
Day 4 – Stage 3 Road Book
We reached 11am and we were still not ready to race, last night we put in a new clutch but we just couldn’t get it to run properly. If you put your foot on the clutch it feels lovely but it just wouldn’t do anything, we took it all back out again and found that there was a problem, the plate was hitting the tops of the rivets on the cover, we put the gearbox back in and it looked like we were going to make our final chance of a start time and unfortunately that didn’t work either. Unfortunately, that means that we won’t be racing Stage 3, we will continue to work to try and get back on track for the Challenge Exam of the final day.
Day 5 – Challenge Exam
After the team worked really hard to get Bad Penny back on track, removing, taking apart and putting back in the transmission about 6 times in total we still didn’t have any luck. We took her for a short test and decided although she was driving, she wasn’t performing at 100%, it wasn’t worth risking the vehicle on the technical course that had been laid out and causing more damage. We called it a day so Bad Penny can run another day.
Coming in 1st place with a 29-minute lead was Sorca Gheorghe from Romania, followed by Benoit Bonnefoi from France in 2nd place with a 6-minute lead over Josip Jakovic from Croatia in third. We would also like to congratulate Erik Kristancic who runs a Gigglepin winch and came in 1st place in the Adventure class.
Best Bits of the Croatia Challenge - All Cars, 3 minute watch: