Big Test

IT’S a tough start to a fully-loaded test: A stiff climb up a soft, greasy forest road – though a series of tight corners…from a standing start. And with the Hino 700 Series logger loaded to close on 45-tonnes.

But C.G. Stokes Transport driver Gary (Pocket Rocket) Lawton’s been here many times before in his Hino FY2945 8x4 and he’s super-confident that this is going to be a pushover.

After all, one of the main reasons he reckons it’s “the best truck I’ve ever driven” is the pulling power of the 12.9-litre 450-horsepower (331kW) Hino engine under the cab.

In fact, he doesn’t even bother to put in the cross-locks on the Hino diffs – just takes the tyre pressures down to 54psi, using the central tyre inflation system, before New Zealand Truck & Driver tester Trevor Woolston moves off.

“Yeah,” says Gary, “the engine’s smooth – and pulling-wise it just seems to be getting better and better.” Peak torque from the E13CVC inline six is 2157Nm at 1100rpm – with 97% of that maximum available over a 500-rev band, from 1000-1500rpm.

Gary drove a Stokes Fuso before this – “a 430 that had been tweaked out to 500. Even though it’d been re-chipped, it didn’t have the lugging power that this has got. This has got great torque – it just hangs on around 1100. Bloody good,” he adds emphatically.

The combo of this road – with its soft spots, unsafe edges, greasy surface and tight bends – and the steepness of the immediate climb ahead, isn’t actually the toughest that the Whangarei-based Hino has to deal with: That honour goes to a nearby road called BCNZ, Gary reckons.

Still, this one – in the forest near Kaikou, about 40 kilometres in a straight line northwest of Whangarei – is pretty close….testing enough that Gary recommended that the young drivers not be put on this run.