TLCC News

When: 12th to 14th of April 2013
Where: Welsh’s Road Milbrodale New South Wales 2330 Australia
Located on private land in the beautiful Upper Hunter Valley is the ideal location for a weekend of camping and challenging offroad mountain climbing courses. A flat open valley provides great camping just walking distance from steep cliff walls which provide the perfect backdrop for roaring 4WD motors skilfully navigating around multiple courses.
Click here for Tuff Truck Challenge Website
The Tough Dog Tuff Truck Challenge (TTC) is a three day, hard as they come, 4WD competition event. The TTC is gruelling and enduring, and provides a real test for competing teams as they push themselves and their vehicles to the absolute limit. Boulders, Rock, Mud, Giant Tyres, Deep Deep Holes and Ruts make up the terrain that competitors must conquer… in hope of taking out the annual perpetual Tuff Truck trophy.
The basis of the event-4WD competition:
Each competing team consists of two people and their vehicle. The three-day event has twelve stages, which consists of one static, ten driving sections and the addition of Verification as a stage, which goes towards each competing team’s points tally.
With the introduction of Verification, teams are checked against tally sheets of compliance in accordance to vehicle rules and regulations such as safety, recovery items, etc. The second static stage is “Show n’ Shine/Engineering”. The Show n’ Shine aspect relates to finer detail of the vehicle’s aesthetic appearance including cleanliness and tidiness. The Engineering aspect involves judging of a vehicle’s engineering features and attributes. Though by the end of the weekend, Show n’ Shine is pretty much forgotten as many of the trucks are not looking to tidy or clean.
The driving stages are predominantly all terrain type courses of which the teams must manoeuvre their vehicles through some rocky and muddy situations against a point scoring system.
The spectator’s (definitely not the competitor’s) favourite is the night mud event ‘Mudrat’s Revenge’. This stage is run under lights on both Friday & Saturday nights. Not viewable by the general public is the mystery night stage, but this makes for good viewing on the official event DVD.
Another stage includes the Travel Ramp. For those that haven’t seen it before this is a brilliant stage to watch. Each vehicle must drive up the 30° ramp in an attempt to gain drive against their wheelbase and show who has the most amount of travel in their suspension system.
The balance of the 12 stages is spread out through the weekend and creates some absolute feats of driving by many of the skilled teams.