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This is the single-news section of the
marathonrally.com rally-live special of the Rainforest Challenge 2006. To navigate please use the upper or right Navigation Bar.
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Rainforest Challenge: Previous year's winner scores again
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With a splendid and luxurious party the 10th Rainforest Challenge ended on Sunday evening in the Cinta Sayang Golf & Country Resort in the Northern state Kedah with the participation of various Malaysian government members. The places from one to three are held by participants from Malaysia.
The first place was again taken by the winner of the previous year Tang Eng Joo and his codriver Lee Yit Kiang on a Jeep CJ and their self developed so called "godswinch" (* the name is there for a reason, see below ...) followed by Wong Kock Phin/Lee Chuin Ping (Toyota Landcruiser) and Wong Chor Chan/Daryl Wong in a Jeep CJ. Further standings were not available until now.
Markus Osswald fron Austria (Jeep Cherokee) won the category "electric winches" and took a fourth place in the category "vehicles with more than 3000cc". In spite of several problems with their Landrover the Polish couple Marek und Agnieszka Janaszkiewcz secured the victory in the class "vehicles between 2000cc and 3000cc". The funny part of the story: All other four cars in this class are also Landrovers and even had more technical problems than the winner or hardly finished a stage at all. Reason enough for the other participants to ironically rename the class to "Broken Landrover Challenge" during the finishing party.
After about 10 days of jungle camps in camp beds surrounded by insects and various other animals the return to civilization, warm showers and dry beds was welcomed by everyone. So the last night together was well used. Two journalists from India managed to organize several cans of beer (alcohol is hardly available in the Muslim northern part of Malaysia) that were happily shared at the side of the pool between participants, press and tourists. Similar to the desert rallys in Tunisia the whole event ended with everyone being thrown into the pool. With nightly temperatures of 27 degrees (air) and 30 degrees (water) an enjoyable ending of a cheerful night.
On Monday morning the RFC convoy separated one final time. While some of the participants directly went home the foreign teams, journalists and press rode in buses back to Kuala Lumpur to the Corus Hotel next to the Petronas Towers. The vibrating city of Kuala Lumpur is breathtaking. Every few hundred meters a new skyscraper is being built, shops are open around the clock and the city is a melting pot of all nationalities. As a contrast German cities almost feel slightly medieval compared to "KL" as everyone calls Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
*: The "godswinch" is an originally self constructed winch with amazing performance capabilities in combination with being highly insecure. A construction of a kind of Suzuki shaft coupled to the engine yields an enormous amount of power and vehicle winching speeds of up to 50 km/h (!). The winch is available in Malaysia only but lacks basic security features, is not compliant with international safety standards and its use is highly emotionally discussed among the RFC participants.
To balance the advantages that godswinch equipped cars have the organization tried to balance the special stages so that winching alone was only a small part of the required skills to succeed as the numerous foreign participants with normal winches felt handicapped.
2006/12/07 | 02:50 CET | Editor: RFC Live-Team/js
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