Taupo 1000: Necessary's Journal - Different. Totally Different.

Taupo 1000: Necessary’s Journal - Different. Totally Different.

I’m coming to you from the island nation of New Zealand, which is off the east coast of Australia. What am I doing on the other side of the world? Glad you asked, Grasshopper...

SPEED Staff | Posted February 23, 2008

Hi folks, Kevin Necessary here, captain of the good ship Team Necessary. I’m coming to you from the island nation of New Zealand, which is off the east coast of Australia. What am I (and, for that matter, my merry band of goofballs) doing on the other side of the world? Glad you asked, Grasshopper.

We’re here to compete in the Taupo 1000, New Zealand’s biggest and baddest off-road race. But as much as we love the adventure aspect of taking on another rough terrain race in our race-prepped Toyota FJ Cruiser (Our first outing in it, the Baja 1000, was beyond epic), this race is a whole different animal.

The biggest change from Baja is that we’re going into this event pretty blind. We didn’t have any idea what the course down here would be like when were putting the truck together in our shop back in SoCal, and since we knew we’d have limited resources down here, we’re pretty much forced to guesstimate on setup and come up with the best options as we thrashed to get the truck ready and on the boat a month ahead of the event.

And now that I’ve seen the course and had a chance to do a little pre-running, I can confidently say that the course for Baja and the course for Taupo could not be more different. It’s completely different from what we were expecting. We thought it would be a lot rockier, rugged terrain, but it’s actually a lot soupier, with sections of pumice-like gravel. Plus, it’s so cold; when we were packing and doing other preparations we didn’t have any idea temperatures could get that low.

On the flipside, one of the advantages of the Taupo course compared to Baja is that it’s relatively short and run in laps. With Baja, a stupid-long point-to-point affair, you can pre-run all you want but you still won’t be able to memorize all 1000 miles of it. In fact, we were able to map and memorize this Taupo course after just one recon lap – all 35 miles of it. But this doesn’t mean we plan on going all-out both days: Our plan for the first day is to kind of nurse it along and keep the gear together while a lot of the competitors drop out and crash out and break out, and then get our race on during the second and final day.

So…will our cunning strategy pay off? Will we meet our numero uno goal, which is to just finish this amazing race? And exactly how many boxes of firecrackers will we consume? I guess you’ll just have to tune into SPEED to find out.

Click here for more on the Two Roads to the Taupo 1000 on SPEED!