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One day soon you may need an off-road licence. We visited the Isuzu Off Road Academy to learn more

Posted on 9 July, 2012

Pics supplied

Commonsense and discipline

This planet is the only one we have and we cannot continue ripping the guts out of Mother Earth and littering her pristine trails. Accordingly, in a bid to curb further damage, the Department of Sport and Recreation has prepared legislation that will require drivers to hold a special licence before being allowed into ecologically sensitive areas.

As usual, the antics of a minority have forced authorities to take action. Irresponsible behaviour and antisocial activity by uncaring, and often unskilled, “amateur” off-roaders are mostly to blame. Because the off-roading community isn’t trusted with policing itself, the government decided to intervene. Policies and requirements are still being finalised, but it is believed that, like the skipper’s licence and certificate of fitness for inland powerboaters and their craft, compliance requirements will be put in place for off-roaders too.

Basically, drivers will need to attend and pass a prescribed course of training, after which they may be registered as “operators of off-road vehicles.” The course will not be a walk in the park and only working drivers will be exempted - farmers going about their daily activities, for example. Grant Mc Cleery, convener of the Isuzu Off-Road Academy has 25 years’ experience in the game. He nonetheless found on attending the pilot training course that he still had a lot to learn before qualifying for the coveted licence.

Sobering thoughts, indeed, but they lend depth to the training offered by Mc Cleery and his team to GM dealers, private individuals and drivers from the SA Police and other government departments. Unlike most 4x4 courses, the Isuzu Academy uses its own vehicles rather than training in customers’ machinery. It also offers instruction at venues countrywide, in addition to its home base at Gerotek near Pretoria. One of these off-campus training grounds is the SA Police 4x4 school at the privately owned Slagboom Outdoor Adventure facility in the Eastern Cape hills about an hour-and-a-half’s drive out of Port Elizabeth.

The venue’s various trails are rated between ‘three’ and ‘five’ on a scale only diehard off-roaders fully understand, with ‘five’ being the most difficult. With an eye to refreshing old hands’ skills and introducing newcomers to the craft, Isuzu SA arranged for Mc Cleery and his professional instructors to coach a group of twenty motoring writers through what Slagboom has to offer. Advice was given freely, participants were mentored according to the skill levels they displayed and no one was given a chance to get too cocky. In an actual daylong training programme, there would be classroom time with theory, advice and anecdotal evidence in addition to the practical application sessions we were given.

These include reading the track ahead and choosing the easiest and safest route, remembering to drive across larger rocks rather than over them when they could damage a differential housing and disciplining oneself to let the vehicle do the work when the going gets really tough. Imagine a steep ascent or descent littered with stones, or a pool of slimy wet mud. The drill is to select first gear in 4Lo and let the Isuzu walk itself through – no brakes, no clutch, no more than just enough power to keep moving.

Then there’s the unthinkable that happens to everyone eventually. You lose traction on all four wheels and bog down. That’s where trail craft and the school’s suggested recovery kit come into their own. Consisting of gloves for working near hot surfaces, a siphoning tube for those out-of-fuel moments, two heavy duty “D” shackles, a towing strap, a polyamide (what we peasants call ‘nylon’) kinetic snatching strap and a harness for evening out pulling forces, it costs about R3000 to assemble but could save your bacon one day.

After showing that a deliberately stranded vehicle wasn’t going anywhere because all four wheels spun uselessly, the team set to work. Step one was to open the non-mover’s bonnet. Should something break and fly back like a bullet, the bonnet offers some protection before windscreen, and possibly driver, get damaged. Step two was to attach the rescue strap to both vehicles – fabric around the ‘U” of the shackle and pin through the towing eyelet. Not the other way around. No twists in the strap, please. And don’t forget to back the shackle pin off half a turn after tightening otherwise it could weld itself fast under load. Step three is for both vehicles to apply power together.

To demonstrate that a simple tow doesn’t always work, this was attempted first. It didn’t. It’s usually more effective to attach the polyamide kinetic snatch strap, leave some slack and let the towing vehicle take a running start. The polyamide strap has some stretch, so like a rubber band that snaps back and hurts you, the nylon stretches, snaps back and plucks the disabled vehicle free. Works almost every time. It’s cheaper and easier to use than a winch, and doesn’t need one of Mother Nature’s trees to pull against.

To learn more, visit www.isuzu.co.za and follow the links via “Experience Isuzu” to the Off-road Academy.



First gear, low ratio and let it walk

The author and co-pilot ford a stream. Soon, they could need licences to do so.

Stuck fast: Phone for help and pop the hood before towing begins

A rolling start, the nylon stretches, twangs and we’re free

What We Do

This is a one-man show, which means that road test cars entrusted to me are driven only by me. Some reviewers hand test cars over to their partners to use as day-to-day transport and barely experience them for themselves.

What this means to you is that every car reviewed is given my own personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.
Every car goes through real world testing; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.

My articles appear every Wednesday in the motoring pages of The Witness, South Africa's oldest continuously running newspaper, and occasionally on Saturdays in Weekend Witness as well. I drive eight to ten vehicles most months of the year (press cars are withdrawn over the festive season - wonder why?) so not everything gets published in the paper. Those that are, get a tagline but the rest is virgin, unpublished and unedited by the political-correctness police. Hope you like what you see, because there are no commercial interests at work here. As quite a few readers have found, I answer every serious enquiry from my home email address, with my phone numbers attached, so I do actually exist.

I am based in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa. This is the central hub of the KZN Midlands farming community; the place farmers go to buy their supplies and equipment, truck their goods to market, send their kids to school and go to kick back and relax.
So occasionally a cow, a goat or a horse may add a little local colour by finding its way into the story or one of the pictures. It's all part of the ambience!

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