Written by Amelia Corvin-Czarnodolski, PARTRIDGE Placement Student 2021-2022
Since scraping the side of my dad’s ALL4 Mini Countryman in lockdown last year, I have had a deep-set fear of driving big cars that are not my own. Fortunately, this hasn’t been much of a problem since I bought my own little car and renewed my confidence, but imagine my horror when I started my placement at the GWCT and learned that we would be using company cars to travel between sites. Of course, the pool car is a large estate vehicle and the cars used for field work tend to be very intimidating 4x4 trucks.
There goes my confidence – flying out the window in the face of large cars that belong to somebody else.
Luckily, the Trust arranged for us to attend a 4x4 off-road safety awareness training course, run by All Terrain Services in Aldermaston, Reading. To get there we had to borrow the site maintenance vehicle – a very long 4x4 Mazda that none of us had ever even sat in before. Twice we stalled coming out of the car park, and we didn’t realise the pull-out handbrake was still on until we were about 2 miles down the road… oops?
But eventually, we made it to the site and were able to enjoy a full day of training that helped me to overcome my fears. Initially, we did some vehicle checks and our instructor Paul explained what 4x4 actually meant, what that strange second gear stick was for and when we should be driving in each of the different gears/modes. I had no previous experience of off-road driving, so it was quite the eye-opener to be driving through muddy tracks, deep ditches and slippery hills in the middle of a densely wooded area.
We learnt how to leave the vehicle in a safe state i.e., without relying solely on the (obviously not very effective!) handbrake, how to do an effective hill start in low ratio four-wheel drive, how to recover from a failed hill start, how to avoid getting stuck on a ridge, how to recover from getting stuck on a ridge, and how to safely navigate gullies and make it over side-slopes.
Hopefully most of these skills will be fairly redundant for the kind of places we will be going and the driving we will be doing, but the experience was very valuable and restored a lot of my confidence in driving big cars – if I can avoid hitting trees in a densely wooded area, surely, I can navigate farm tracks in an open field!