Trail Savvy: Off-Road Driving Tips, Skills & Practices

Recovery Tracks And How To Use Them

Recovery tracks work on the same principle – no matter whether they are the steel or aluminium ‘sand ladders’ that overlanders have been using since WW2, modern composite versions, or a host of other fold-up or roll-up contraptions.

Quite simply, when you are on a soft or slippery surface, these all spread the load under your wheels to provide a grippy platform that helps you to get going again. At SA4x4, lightweight plastic recovery tracks are our rst go-to recovery aid, and we never leave on a fourwheeling trip without them.

The Australian company, Maxtrax, was one of the rst to perfect a composite version which is semi- exible, tough and effective. That was back in 2005; and since then, dozens of clone products have arrived on the market with similar looks but varying ability... not always based on their price.

Today, almost all recovery tracks are made of a durable plastic and vary widely in their quality. The currently available Maxtrax Mark II, for instance, uses a UVstabilised, exible, supertough engineering-grade reinforced nylon. It is rigid enough to use as a partial bridge, but also bends enough to mould over the surface to some degree. (The much older Mark I version we used and abused for many years was a tad too brittle, and nally cracked on one end during recovery of a heavily loaded Gelandewagen.)

We have found that the cheaper products fall into two camps: those which use much softer plastics that bend right out of shape under load, and those which are too brittle with the added complication that their poorly-designed grip lugs break off when a wheel spins even mildly over their surface.