Driver Johan van Staden & Co-driver Mike Lawrenson are some of the nicest people that anyone will meet. Extremely knowledgeable, interesting to talk to & supremely talented guys.
I’ve often wondered how a vehicle like that would cope with certain obstacles. But now I know
. A bit about the car: it’s got a 5.0 V8 Infinity engine making a restricted 250 kw & 520 Nm all on the wheels. It’s permanently 50/50 drive. LSD at both ends & a modified Patrol axle at the back.
The gearbox is basically sequential. There’s a clutch but that just to pull away with. On the upshift it cuts spark & fuel when changing. On the downshift it just blips the throttle to keep the revs.
I think the top speed is 160 kph. It’ll do 1.2 km/litre.
The whole vehicle is basically a space frame clad with Duster panels. The Reiger stocks cost R40k each & there are 8 of them! It’s performance is sublime. They have a guy who’s job it is to just do shock setup.
Johan is a phenomenal driver. I’ve driven with some really talented sand drivers many times before, but he’s in a different league. I’ve had to reset my head in terms of understanding what is possible. Firstly, he doesn’t appear to have any fear. Not even a bit. He’s by far the most brutal driver I’ve ever driven with. He doesn’t drive the vehicle, he wears it like a skin.
To put the speed into perspective, most of our 4x4s have a maximum top speed of 70 or 80 kph in low range. But it’s extremely difficult to do that speed at AD without damage. Most of the time we are doing a max of 50 or 60 kph through an obstacle at best. Johan on the other hand, was entering dunes at 120 kph! The vehicle just takes whatever he gives it. It’s insane.
The drive he took me on was incredible. I think our dune driving experience gave us a better appreciation for the things he was doing behind the wheel. Finding airtime was normal. It’s as if the dunes weren’t even there. The dunes were little more than speedbumps. It just hammers them into submission.
At one point, we doing about 110 kph at probably around 35 degs a long a slipface, when we hit some sort of big hole. The impact was hard. The left rear tyre had debeaded. The vehicle kicked violently to the right facing up the dune & went completely sideways, still at speed. I thought it was tickets & that we were about to go into a serious high speed roll. But Johan just knocked it back a few gears, cranked the steering hard left & gave it berries. He didn’t even stop. Carried on back to base at full beans.
Incredible stuff & the highlight of my year. It’s hard to imagine a better offroad driver.
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