Rainforest Challenge India 2015

This year’s Rainforest Challenge India built upon the foundations laid by the inaugural edition last year and those willing to tackle it came well prepared.

There were some not-so-subtle hints that the RFC India was not going to be exactly the same as last year’s event despite going to a lot of the same areas of Goa. While looking at the 22 cars lining up for the start of the prologue stages at Dona Paula, anyone who had even seen pictures of the 2014 event could tell that the competitors were taking the event a lot more seriously.

Each car sported at least 33-inch, purpose-built, offroad tyres and high-revving winches with longer cables. That aside there were cars sporting trailing arm suspensions, panhard rods and even specialised coils to improve articulation, thereby making possible many spectacular shots of these off-roaders looking like they are about to topple but somehow scrambling through an obstacle.

The machines used by the winning factory Force Motors team made it even more obvious that the event may just live up to its enthusiastically promoted tagline of ‘Bigger, Badder, Tougher’. Positively massive 37-inch tyres, coil springs all around instead of the leafs on last year’s machine and generally a lot more strengthening of the car that made it 200 kilograms heavier made the Gurkha look like it meant business.

But then, so did the squad of off-roaders who finished third, fourth and fifth behind the Force Motors team last year.

Chandhigarh’s Gerrari Offroaders Club were itching to go better and win the RFC India outright. Third place would still be good enough to earn a spot at the ‘mother’ event in Malaysia but the team, led by Kabir Wariach didn’t seem in any mood to settle for the title of best of the rest.

But that’s where the x-factor of the terrain beyond that of the IT Park in Dona Paula came into play. The CJ3B and the Gypsys fielded by Gerrari had an edge where the terrain called for the vehicles to hustle owing to their significantly lighter bodyweight. And there certainly were sections like that due to the nature of the stages. Unlike last year, where one stage seemed very self contained in a small part of land, teams had to cover a lot more distance this time around.

Within that distance, however, would be waiting one particularly nasty obstacle (at least) that required the co-driver to scramble on the ground, directing the driver over extremely uneven terrain and finding winching points to aid the vehicle’s attempts to pull through.

It was something at which last year’s winning Force Motors team of Tan Eng Joo and Tan Eng Jon excelled and it was no different this year. Their ability to read the terrain coupled with the abilities of the Gurkha, not to mention their own fitness and agility allowed them to move through stages fast once the going started to get really tricky.

But the efforts of Waraich and co-driver Yuvraj Tiwana and Gurmeet Virdi and Kirpal Tung meant the Force Motors team was kept on their toes. The latter leading the event after the two prologue stages prompted representatives from Force Motors to take issue with the marshalls at the stages, which was countered by Gerrari team members recording their rivals at stages in order to point out what they felt were infractions.

It was something that RFC officials from Malaysia and organising body Cougar Motorsport’s head Ashish Gupta felt went against the spirit of intense but friendly competition that they were hoping to see at the event.

Although it was but a minor annoyance in the larger scheme of things, which includes Force Motors willing to expand the RFC’s presence in India by sponsoring regional events where the technical requirements would call for offroaders much closer to factory specification in order to boost entries as well as market the Gurkha.

Anchoring these regional events, however, will be the main event in Goa. To say that scrambling in the muck of the country’s most iconic tourist destination has cache would be a bit of an understatement.