And the winner is......

"a battered 20-year-old Toyota Surf worth less than one-10th of the
brand-new Mitsubishi and Toyota four-wheel drives also in the race"


[url]http://expedition-trophy.com/[/url]
VLADIVOSTOK -- Winning a 2-kilometer car race hardly seems worth getting
excited about, but for Vyacheslav Filipenkov and his team in their
battered Toyota Surf, it meant a prize of 10 kilograms of gold.

This was no ordinary road race, as the finalists had traveled a long,
bumpy, exhausting ride of 16,000 kilometers just to get to the start
line. The final stage, which took them through icy water and snow on the
edge of Vladivostok, was the cherry on the cake of the longest winter
race in the world, the Expedition Trophy.

The race had begun 13 days earlier, on Feb. 23, the Defenders of the
Fatherland Day, at a lighthouse in Kola Bay, near Murmansk. On
Wednesday, International Women's Day, the tired finalists drove up to
the finish line -- another lighthouse, this one on the other side of the
country in Vladivostok. Or, as one contestant put it as he saw the
lighthouse come into view: "At last, we've made it to the dick's end of
the country."

The race was run for the first time last year, a year after President
Vladimir Putin symbolically opened the federal trans-Siberian highway,
which spans 10,500 kilometers from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok -- the
world's longest highway in a single country. Contestants soon found out
that much of the highway is a road in name only.

Organizers made the stage between Chita and Khabarovsk -- more than
2,000 kilometers -- exempt from the competition ratings, saying
participants should just try to get themselves and their cars safely
across the Siberian morass due to the dire state of the roads.

Participants came from as far away as Britain, Latvia and Germany, but
most were Russian, with the roads proving a huge obstacle for
foreigners. A British team, the Yorkshire Terriers, quit at Perm -- less
than halfway -- as the roads and the speed of other contestants got the
better of them.

"I'm not sure that a foreigner can win this race," said one of the
organizers, Alexander Davydov.

One British person did remain in the race, however. Stephanie Ashman,
23, a tourist agent and travel journalist, had intended to travel on the
train that accompanied the race from Moscow to Vladivostok, but got into
an organizer's car in Novosibirsk and wound up riding all the way to
Vladivostok as a navigator. Despite having only a British driver's
license with her, she also drove for part of the way.

"It was really different. It was a lot of fun," Ashman said. "Conditions
are tough, and you get little sleep."

One team had to resort to using a blowtorch to keep their windows clear
as temperatures plummeted during the night, while another kept driving
despite their car rolling over twice in one night during the stage from
Khabarovsk to Vladivostok. There were a number of crashes, but no one
was seriously hurt.

Organizers said they were cooperating with the traffic police, asking
them to control the cars' speed by stopping them when they broke the
speed limit. All the teams broke the speed limit at some point to cross
the country in just 13 days.

Team Astra, made up of three doctors from a hospital in Vykhino,
averaged speeds of about 110 to 120 kilometers per hour, said team
member Ivan Gordeyev, adding that the team had been much faster last
year, when they had a more powerful car. Traffic police stopped their
car only five times in 16,000 kilometers, and they paid on-the-spot
fines, Gordeyev said.

Despite their medical expertise, Gordeyev and his teammates were like
any typical Russian drivers, driving without wearing seat belts and
chain-smoking their way across the country. In what became a race
in-joke, every now and again one of the other teams would drive up to
the Astra car and ask, "Is there a doctor in the house?" they said.

Race organizers also set a world record for the largest sausage cooked
in the open air -- 18 meters -- which they grilled on a frozen-over Lake
Baikal.

Contestants had to race around the lake as part of the race, before
crossing it.

Small trees were dug into the ice to show the route across the lake.
Although the ice was up to a meter thick in places, elsewhere meter-wide
cracks appeared and wooden boards were placed over them to prevent any
cars falling through the ice.

Fillipenkov's victory was the biggest surprise, as he and his three
teammates, who raced under the name Team Mult & Co., won in a battered
20-year-old Toyota Surf worth less than one-10th of the brand-new
Mitsubishi and Toyota four-wheel drives also in the race. Their car even
had to be towed to the end of one stage.

"We didn't have anything," Fillipenkov said, adding that he and his
teammates had barely managed to scrape together the $900 entry fee for
the race's qualifying event.

Organizers stipulated that each team had to include at least one female
member, an idea that Fillipenkov wasn't initially happy with. He took a
fellow Yekaterinburg native, Olesya Karimova, onto his team.

"At first I didn't trust her, and even took the computer away to check,"
he said of the navigating system that all the cars used. Later, he said,
he realized that she was an excellent navigator.

When asked if she would get one-third of the gold first prize, Karimova
smiled and said, "The captain will decide. We'll see."