Force Gurkha Rainforest Challenge (RFC) India: Season 2

Modified On Jul 30, 2015 01:25 PM By Abhijeet for Force Gurkha 2017-2020

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Pegged among the 10 toughest off-road challenges of the world, the Rainforest Challenge is up for it’s second innings in India. The Indian chapter of this Malaysia originated competition is currently taking place in a rain-soaked Goa, beginning from 24th July. The seven day event will be home to some of the highly bread off-roaders of the country and will test their driving skill in their highly modified off-road vehicles.

Like the previous year, RFC 2015 is held by Force Gurkha and is also the defending champion of their last year’s victory. They are currently battling to win the event with players from off-road houses like Gerrari Offroaders (Chandigarh), Charminar offroad club, offroaders from Kerela, from Goa, Bangalore, Hyderabad, from Polaris India and so on.

This gruesome event tests the participants in areas like their vehicular handling skills, preserving nature, time, safety and, of course, their presence of mind and teamwork. Apart from this, the event requires high level of mental and physical endurance that the teams are practising for almost a year now. Compared to the last year’s RFC, this time around it is tagged as Bigger, Badder and tougher. So let's find out what are the major challenges to be faced by the participants.

The competition consists of four legs- Prologue, Predator, Terminator and Twilight. All of these are then divided in 24 subcategories named as Special Stages (SS). All the SS are composed of challenging landscape including ruts, gullies, trenches, natural as well as artificial obstacles and impassable streams of water.

Here is the development so far in the event and we bring you the latest of this action live from the battlefield i.e. Goa.

RFC Day 1

Most of the first-day time was dedicated to the scrutiny of the remaining vehicles followed by the a precise press conference. The driver briefing took place soon after and the day was concluded with the completion of the opening ceremony in the night.

RFC Day 2

The second day witnessed the first leg of RFC 2015, the Prologue, that included Special Stages 1-6. There were many drivers that had driven in the last season of RFC and were acquainted with the level of difficulty. Along with them were couple of new entrants including the duo of Dr Chaitanya Challa and Manpreet Singh, representing Charminar Off-road Adventure Club. The current addition of RFC is much more challenging than the last year’s event as there is overwhelming level of rain in the state. An obstacle caught Kabir Waraich by surprise when he toppled his Mahindra CJ3B Jeep during a special stage. Kabir finished 3rd last year.

Ashish Gupta, founder and director, cougar motorsport pvt ltd, said, “The competition is intense and the Indian team which went to malaysia last year for the rfc Mother event seems to have picked up all the tricks in the book. However, it is too early for us to come to any conclusions as it is just the first day and we still have a long way to go before the final winner is announced.”

RFC Day 3

Day 3 was carried forward with the continuation of the remaining part of the Prologue, SS7-12. The day witnessed Jeep no 117 driven by Maninder Singh who got stuck sideways at SS12 and was declared DNF. While, the unique blue truck no. 110, driven by Hydross Niaz, suffered a damaged on front steering axle during stage 8.

The time allotted to clear the SS8 was 8 minutes, as explained by Randeep Miglani, Marshal of SS8. The benchmark for this stage was set by Tan Eng Joo who was able to finish SS8 in mere 2 min 50 sec. Kabir Waraich looked strong during this stage, but lost his way and was declared DNF.

The event is pacing forward with the predator stage that took place on July 28, 2015. The location of the event is now shifted to south Goa for this stage. With the shifting of venue, there is a considerable hike in the toughness of the event. Till this stage, the top four scorers remained same with Tan Eng Joo from Force Motors Team emerging at the top spot with an overall score of 1444. While, Mervyn Lim also performed good and grabbed the second spot with 1281 points. At the third spot was Kabir Waraich from Gerrari offroaders Chandigarh with 1259 points.

As per Ashish Gupta, Founder & Director of Cougar Motorsport, the organizers of the event, “”RFC India, like its Mother Event, is quite unpredictable where each day brings new and increasingly tougher challenges which can change the game completely. The event has been quite interesting so far with two Force Motors teams and two teams from Gerrari Offroaders consistently emerging as the top four position holders. However, last year the Terminator leg saw a major shift in the game with Kabir jumping from ninth to the third position. I am keen to see if something similar will happen this year as well with some other team suddenly overtaking all the others to get a podium finish”.”

Siddhartha Santosh (Yanrenthung Jamio) of Bangalore Offroaders Development Association (BODA) moved up one position to claim a place in the top five, while Goan driver Cedrick Jordan DaSilva (Floyd Preston) were pushed back sixth from fifth position. A total of 22 teams were initially competing for the Force Gurkha RFC India 2015. However, with two teams having withdrawn, now there are 20 teams left out of which the winner of India’s only international off-road motorsport event will be announced on 31st July.