Autosportfoto

Magam has started!

The Stage 1 of Magam Trophy is finished. Tomorrow, when the Stage 2 is over, we will get to know the classification. In a meanwhile, let's have a look on what happened on Tuesday afternoon. The organizers have planned 4 MT ('between the tapes') trials. First of them was quite easy and short mud that most of the participants crossed on wheels only, without winches. After this short warm up competitors fell into bigger and wider mud, that took longer to get off from. The culmination of the Stage 2 was the long and gruelling traverse and after it the evenly difficult to overcome long and extensive mud.

The traverse appeared to be very difficult for most of the teams. The wide space between the tapes allowed to choose the various passing lanes and overtake the opponents without any trouble. Fans admired very interesting techniques of overcoming the steepness. Whilst ones struggled by using the winches, others, on the edge of the spin, tried to overcome the route as fast as possible. Jarosław Jarzębowski and Krzysztof Gołda have come up first from this trap, soon followed by Artur Owczarek, who overcame the team of  Jakub Kuśmierczak and Krzysztof Kwiatkowski. The side by side contest was nothing comparing to the problems happened to Dominique Trafoier - during the downhill drive his rim broke and the wheel drove away. Long time afterwards the team of the damaged car reached the base camp. One of the Latvian teams overheated the engine and tried to save it by... drawing the water from the nearby lake. Few teams from the Adventure Class almost at the same time lost the power supply - as you remember, this is the class with electrical winches only, which cannot work without the electric current.

The ending of this stage, the forth MT trial, looked very interesting. As the first to come up from it were: Owczarek and Popławski, then Jarzębowski and Gołda, followed by Kuśmierczak and Kwiatkowski. But the forth team (Łukaszewski and Duhanik) took the biggest applause - they were driving in the most spectacular and efficient way by overcoming this trial on wheels only as the first. We could have seen the long ropes, almost fully outspread, up to 80 meters! Swedes came up first from the Adventure Class, but it's probably because they passed the trial on the traverse by.