Odyssey Challenge Winch series makes fi rst ever visit to Devils Pit

Odyssey Challenge breaks new ground with fi rst ever visit to Devil’s Pit as 2021 season gathers pace

Words: Pip Evans Pics: Tomasz Jarecki

There are a great many diffi culties associated with organising an event. That’s not just a Covid thing – ask anyone who’s done it and they’ll tell you an organiser’s life is not an easy one.

One such issue is trying to fi nd a date which doesn’t clash with other events. This is a signifi cant concern, especially when there’s a limited number of competitors to go round, and doubly so when the last knockings (hopefully) of lockdown have bitten a lump out of the fi rst part of the season.

This was why Round 2 of the Odyssey challenge series was run just a fortnight after the fi rst one. In our (hopefully, again) post-Covid world, it’s a bit like buses… you wait 18 months for one, then two come along 14 days apart!

Another issue is fi nding a suitable venue. It needs to offer severe enough terrain to test the abilities of the competitors – and this is no mean feat, as the abilities of the vehicles in the Odyssey Challenge are indeed considerable.

On top of all this, there’s also the issue of keeping the competitors entertained. Visiting the same old places over and over again can become repetitive, so the Viking 4x4 Club is always on the lookout for somewhere new.

For Round 2, all boxes were ticked when we rolled up at Devil’s Pit. Many people are familiar with this site, near Barton-le-Clay in Bedfordshire, as a playday venue, but the Odyssey crew had never previously considered it for a challenge event until one of our guys suggested it as a possibility.

And boy, what a place it turned out to be! The Pit has everything a club needs for running a challenge event – plenty of parking space, good accessibility and most important of all, great terrain.

This event was sponsored by LOF Clutches. LOF are great for your everyday standard stuff – and incredible when it comes to exotic stuff. If you want to mate a Mercedes or LS engine to a Landy gearbox, LOF is the place to go to get a clutch for it.

So to the action. Teams in the Odyssey don’t get many chances to take on a completely new site, so there was an extra sense of excitement during the briefi ng as they got ready for the usual 10am start. And as it turned out, there was plenty to get excited about.

Devil’s Pit has some very diffi cult terrain and extremely steep slopes. It becomes extremely slippery when the ground is wet, but on this occasion it hadn’t rained in ages and even the boggiest parts of the site were bone dry. So there was plenty of grip for the huge, aggressive tyres attached to each corner of a modern challenge truck, and the course designers had to take every opportunity the land gave them to set out the punches so they would ask questions of the competitors.

As might be expected, then, as happens whenever vehicles are pushed to their limits, things will break. Matt Bain and winchman David Burton were going great guns, pushing hard to go one better than the second place they achieved last time out. In doing so, they found the

limits of their truck’s suspension travel and it rewarded them with a nice view of its chassis.

They quickly recovered is, but gravity dealt them a bit of a blow as oil had reached places it wasn’t supposed to and clogged up the engine’s air intake. This resulted in copious amounts of smoke and a trip to the pits was required to top up with a bit more oil.

It was great to see Dave Adams out for the fi rst time in what was a new truck to him. He was having a whale of a time, but sadly his diesel lift pump was having none of it and poor Dave had to spend most of the event on nothing more than tickover revs. He did remarkably well on winch power alone.

Competing in motorsport is not exactly a cheap affair. A 4x4 a competition vehicle is generally at the lower end of the expense scale, but even then many competitors still have to run their truck on a shoestring budget.

Hugh Gascoigne suffered from this scenario as his low-budget 24-volt alternator couldn’t keep up with the demands placed on it by the two Odyssey Batteries which were pushing out a considerable amount of amps to his winches. This meant that he had to sit around a few times while the alternator built up enough electricity for him to be able to continue.

Away from the mechanical side, Henry Papworth, who won the fi rst event, was going well – albeit with a different winchman, as he’d worn the last one out. Georgie Smith and her winchman Will Baker, meanwhile, returned to the pits for a whole other kind of rest. They were taking the leisurely approach and just stopped for a spot of lunch! Who said challenge competition had to be challenging!

And stopping for lunch didn’t make them duffers, either. At the end of the event, they had scored 5086 points – giving them fi rst place in Class 1. That beat Dave Adams and Tom Britten, whose determination to keep going ultimately scored them 3184 points.

In Class 2, third place went to Hugh Gascoigne and Jack Watson on 2130 points. It was close, though – Kevin Bates and Joby Hooley were just two punch scores ahead of them in second, on 2298.

Top spot, meanwhile, went to Matt Wothers and Paul Hitchman. Matt’s brand new winch broke down and caused him serious issues in the previous event, but its manufacturer had sorted him out in double-quick time and this time it performed fl awlessly. When you look at the second and third-placed scores, it says everything about Matt’s dominance in Class 2 that he fi nished the day on 5103.

Class 3 is where the biggest scores tend to come from, and sure enough third-placed Paul Curling and Andrew Rossiter came home with 6221 points. Paul is a seasoned campaigner who enjoys doing challenge events, but generally at a bit more of a sedate pace than some of the younger competitors, so it was great to see him in a podium position on this occasion. Devil’s Pit obviously suits him!

As per Round 1, the big battle was between Matt Bain and Henry Papworth. Also as per Round 1, they were the only teams to complete one punch card and return for a second. This time, however, the fi nal positions were reversed with Henry and winchman Luke Darley fi nishing second on 9925 points. That left Matt, with David Burton on winch duty, to secure the win with an awesome performance that scored them a massive 11,728 points.

One other similarity to Round 1 was that Devil’s Pit was a closed event. Hopefully it will have been the last; with a gap of ten weeks now until Round 3, the Viking 4x4 Club is hopeful that it will be possible to run it totally free from Covid restrictions. That will mean service crews, families and spectators will once again be allowed on site – and as always on the Odyssey Challenge, it will certainly be very well worth watching!