Triangle Vert A hardcore French lane run in a then-new Jeep Cherokee

2002-2022: TWENTY YEARS SINCE THE FIRST ISSUE OF TOTAL OFF ROAD

A kick up the Arras

Fifty vehicles stuck on a green lane? Part and parcel of an old-school French randonnée. But when all the bumping causes the crate of beer in the back of your Jeep to start exploding, that’s when you know you’re really in trouble…

Words and pictures: Alan Kidd

We’re stuck. The lane’s so narrow, no-one can get round us. All there is to do is reverse. But we can’t do that, either. There’s a convoy of fi fty vehicles behind us. And none of the fi rst three motors on the road have a winch.

Yes, this is defi nitely going to be a tough one.

Alongside giants like the Mille Rivières and Croisière Blanche, the Triangle Vert is not the best known of France’s many randonnées. But it attracts more British entries than any other. A one-day event that’s usually held around Easter time, it offers a mixture of wide open farm tracks, rutted lanes and the occasional sea of mud – and what attracts so many entries from across the Channel is that unlike many of France’s more famous randonnées, it’s held within a stone’s throw of Calais.

The 2002 event was in fact a little further afi eld than usual, being based in the town of Béthune (look on a map and you’ll see that in the greater scheme of things, it’s still not far from Calais). The organising Hors Macadam Club says it’s started having to limit numbers in order to avoid arousing the wrath of local ‘antis’ – a sign, perhaps, that these events, which have at times provided some spectacularly chaotic scenes, are going to have to start becoming a lot more disciplined in future.

Not that that was very apparent as the gaggle of 4x4s waited for us four hapless Brits at the head of the convoy to get our act together. Two standard Discoverys, a Cherokee and a winchedup 90 on big mud tyres… and which one do you think we chose to lead the way?

So here we are in our Cherokee, third in line with the 90 behind us, fi nally the Discoverys have got through and now it’s our turn. We’re on BFG

The competitive element of events like the Triangle Vert comes from spotting code boards and stopping off at various landmarks along the way to answer what the organisers call ‘touristic’ questions. It’s not unknown for people to ignore this completely and just treat it as the mother of all lane runs

Mud-Terrains, which is always a good thing, but we’ve looked at the ground and what’s causing the problem is a set of deep ruts. And with our independent front end…

Oh well, nothing for it but to try. Grab fourwheel drive, lock the centre diff, low box and give it death… Hold on, it’s an auto, would high box be better? High box, and give it death. Or should we try and spin our way through? What the hell, just give it death anyway and let’s see what happens.

Look at that, we’re stuck.

Discovery number two yanks us off our perch, muddy ropes get tossed in the back of previously tidy vehicles, the 90 walks through the ruts as if they weren’t there and we’re away.

As it happens, this was about the only really dodgy part of this year’s route. The 2001 event had been a breeze, and we reached the finish so early there was no-one there from the club to book us in, but we knew from experiences of previous Triangles Verts that winches, snatch blocks and kinetic ropes could all end up being pressed into action to get the vehicles, some of them very well prepped, through some mighty great fields of mud.

Some of those vehicles were ours, too. Kit Kaberry, he of stuck Discovery number one, used to campaign a 200Tdi 90 with a winch, a Drew Bowler cage and an ARB in the rear, before moving on to the Heritage 90 that made way for his current chariot. That ARB came in handy many a time – as well as saving our collective bacon on the 1998 event, when between us we suffered four slow punctures in the space of a hundred yards. We made it home on what we had left, stopping every few miles to reinflate our flagging rubber with the air line from the ARB’s compressor.

Justin Thomas’ greatest moment, meanwhile, came when he took part at the helm of a Camel Trophy Discovery belonging to his employer, main dealer Testers Land Rover, which suffered more mechanical traumas during one day in France than it had on the Trophy itself. And he was in the navigator’s seat of stuck Discovery number two. Last, and probably least, the bloke from this here magazine in the stuck Cherokee took part several times in another 90, best remembered for usually having at least one spotlight missing from on top of its roll cage, before campaigning a hybrid borrowed from Gumtree 4x4 which stopped for nothing and sported a set of Bronco tyres that made little girls cry.

The Cherokee (an early KJ model) looked more demure than the tank-like XJ that came before it, and this was our first time in one. As it turned out, it was still a very capable motor – a touch more prone to grounding out at the front, as we discovered, but every bit as agile. And whereas the XJ was on leaves at the back, the KJ graduated to coils, meaning less in the way of ludicrous wheels-up antics on uneven ground.

Was that a good thing? Not if you’re a congenital show-off, but I’ll try and see past that. And anyway, I digress. Our Cherokee took to the Triangle Vert like a duck to water. In fact, the only real drama came when a crate of duty-free beer took umbrage at the rough terrain and started exploding in the back.

Our navigator had a solution to this, though. He drank it.

All of which begs the question, is this kind of off-roading more fun in a vehicle that can do it at a canter, or one that’ll make you work to get through? Well, we had a ball on previous events, and we had a ball this time, too. Maybe we weren’t quite so gung-ho, in deference to our altogether daintier vehicles, and this to me is the nub of it.

What you want to get out of your off-roading is down to personal preference – but in my view the main thing is not to worry so much about whether you’ll get stuck, but to be comfortable with the idea of your 4x4 sustaining a few scratches. The big problem in a shiny new vehicle is that every time it grounds out, or some overhanging vegetation reaches out and makes a grab for its paintwork, you cringe; and for me, to spend the whole day trying to avoid that takes the fun out of it.

Not that the Triangle Vert is a damaging event as such; neither the Cherokee nor the Discoverys suffered any woes, save from the sort we could get rid of with a bit of T-Cut. But we did get superbly muddy – and one of the most enjoyable parts of a gig like this is the drive back home, the looks you get in the queue for your Channel crossing, the feeling of parking outside your house and climbing out of a 4x4 that looks like it’s really seen some action.

In our case, you can add to that the extremely surreal experience of pulling in to a petrol station in Folkestone, turning round after paying the cashier – and finding myself face to face with none other than Vic Reeves.

He was wearing a waistcoat. I was wearing several pounds of mud. Bet I looked cooler.

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