THE tucker truck and its accompanying trailer was bogged, the five-minute shortcut turning in to an hour-long recovery, before we were again carving up a dust storm behind each set of vehicle wheels.
Our adventure had started a few days earlier when our judges and film crew gathered, along with the 18 vehicle contenders for this year’s 4X4OTY awards, at the Australian Automotive Research Centre, inland from the surf coast south of Geelong. We were a long way away from any surf though, as we took each and every vehicle for a spin around the bitumen road loops and then around the gravel-road section of the test tracks that make up this world-class vehicle test facility.
With lots of miles slipping under our belts, we then took the vehicles to the steep hill section of
