OK, I know that last line of the introduction is a little over the top. Sure my craft has put me into highly dangerous situations like having to duck the occasional wayward golf ball from guys like Afrit's Albert van de Wetering but there is a limit to how far one will go you know.

The thing is: My kids sometimes read what I write and as they get older, I have to exaggerate things a little so as to keep my hero status in their eyes. It's easy with my nine-year-old daughter who will stare wide-eyed as I describe how I bravely ducked the incoming missile that was Albert's golf ball. However, my 18-year-old 'girl not yet a woman' and my 16-year-old thug son are a little harder to convince. They need something more. I'm sure you'll all understand.

So there we were - a brave group of dedicated trucking journalists - sitting in trucks at the top of a mountain which rumbled ominously beneath us as it prepared to spew forth the contents of its belly in a fiery blaze of pyrotechnic glory. It was just a matter of time before this resting giant would erupt and engulf us in roaring tons of molten rock. How long we did not know. What we did know is that we had to get off the mountain -fast.
 

I looked down at the brake pedal of the Volvo FH16 and thought, we're in trouble. The gradient was far too steep for the service brakes to safely handle the speed at which we had to descend. It is a well known fact that when operated harshly and over prolonged periods, brakes can reach temperatures of up to 1000 0C with a resultant sharp drop in braking efficiency. Given the steep decline and sharp turns we would have to negotiate down our escape route, brake fade would surely kick in. We were doomed. The mountain continued to rumble - even more than before it seemed to me. I looked across the cab at our driver Giuseppe Piccione. Sure we were in good hands. After all, not only had he driven trucks as a professional long-haul driver for many years before becoming a test and trainer driver for Volvo Truck Italia, but his father had also been in the profession as were his two sons. It ran in the family. Qualified he was but even he would not be able to prevent the heat build up of continuous application of the service brakes down that steep gradient. Images of my family went through my mind as I felt the ground shake under the truck. It was about to happen. We had to get off the mountain - NOW! "Get going Giuseppe," I yelled. "We'll have to risk a fast descent and hope the brakes can take it. You can do it my man. You can do it." I thought a bit of false encouragement would spur him into action - but he just sat there, looking ahead, calm, relaxed and smiling. "What are you smiling at? Your kids are fine. Grown up and all that. Mine still need me. My youngest daughter needs to get to a Hip-Hop competition at Sun City when I get back. My son needs to get to Cape Town to play in the Western Province Open Championships and my elder daughter needs to get her learner's licence. And then there's my wife? You think Italian women are fiery? You don't know my wife. She's waiting for the copy from this trip so she can finish the layout of the magazine. The wrath of this mountain is nothing compared to hers if I don't get the copy to her on time. Get going. We have to get off this mountain." "Why are you panicking," he asked in a soothing gentle tone as he looked serenely into my eyes. "Giuseppe, are you CRAZY," I screamed back at him. "If you go now before the mountain erupts we can take it slower so as to keep the brakes cool and preserve their effectiveness. I thought you were a professional driver and would know that." "You have no need to worry," he said as he calmly started the engine. "This truck has a Voith Retarder fitted to it. There is no chance of the service brake failing as I won't be using them at all on the descent. They'll stay cold and fully operational so if we need them in an emergency, they'll work. But that won't happen because the retarder is going to give us optimum braking power at low and high speed. I won't even put my foot near the brake pedal. There's no need to as the Voith retarder will do all the braking for us." "Oh. Why didn't you tell me before? In that case, switch off as I want to get out and feel the rumblings of the mountain under my feet." "Hey PATREEEEK!!! Get in. The mountain, she is about to explode," he shouted in panic as I stepped down from the cab. "Take it easy Giuseppe. We've got plenty of time. I just want to amble across that old lava and take some photographs of the volcano as it erupts. We've got braking power via the retarder so we'll get down safely. Relax boet." Slight exaggeration OK, as I said, there's a slight hint of exaggeration in telling the story but apart from the rumblings of the mountain and the panic-screaming between Giuseppe and me, the rest is all true. The Volvo FH16 - a powerful beast with a 660HP engine - was one of the trucks used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Voith Retarder in the extreme braking conditions that Mount Etna presented. Voith Turbo has worked with a number of manufacturers in designing the ideal retarder for their particular trucks and the Volvo FH16 was fitted with the Compact Retarder VR 3250. The Mercedes-Benz Actros 1848 in which I was also taken for a test run was fitted with the VR 115 HV model while the MAN tipper had the new Voith Aquatarder fitted to it. Then there was the Renault Premium fitted with the Voith VR 3250 retarder.   THE MAN TGA 41.480 tipper was fitted with the new Voith Aquatarder - a high performance component of the MAN Common Raul diesel engine of the D20 series. This variety of product to ideally match different specced trucks gives credence to Voith management's statement that the company looks to forging close, long-term co-operative partnerships with its development partners and truck manufacturers in its quest to become a preferred supplier and business partner. Developing and designing products to suit a manufacturer's spec is what it's all about. The end results are the same - namely, superior braking power with all the side advantages - but getting there requires a different route for different people.

Frosty Exhibit: Model presentations demonstrating various benefits of the Voith Retarder were presented on the peak of Mount Etna. Good Grief! Trekking across the peak in a perilous, raging snow-storm to see another exhibit. And you thought journalism was easy. Huh! This house was buried under a lava flow mere hours before we took to the mountain. Not quite. It was sometime in the 1980s. And here it is. The 'mouth' of the volcano. That's not mist rising. It's smoke coming from the dragon's mouth. Danger lurks. Check those trucks heading up a road cut through fields of lava left from the last major eruption of Mount Etna in the 1980s. It's harsh but pretty.

It's no wonder then that Voith as a company holds over 7 000 active patents worldwide with approximately 400 being added every year. That's across the board because while we in South Africa know Voith for its retarders, the group is also involved in paper making technology, power transmissions, energy technology and industrial services.

How's this for a fact: Every third piece of paper used in the world today comes off a Voith paper machine. The group has annual sales of over three-million Euro - (why doesn't HP put a Euro symbol on this keyboard?) - and more than 24 000 staff are employed in some 200 locations worldwide. And the company is still family owned - one of the largest family owned companies in Europe.

The beauty of this latter point is that while the group is massive, it still embraces those old family values which ensure personal service, responsiveness and the ability to make quick decisions. Cumbersome bureaucratic structures that normally accompany large sized corporations are pushed aside allowing an entrepreneurial approach to dominate all its actions. Thus the 400 new patents added to its arsenal every year. It's all kewl stuff this but let's get back to keeping the service brakes cool.
 

Dreaming of jet-skiing in sunny Durban are Bruce Dickson, divisional director of Voith Turbo in SA (right), with his erstwhile friend Friedrich Fuchs, area manager for Africa.	Briefing the journo's before the ascent are Dr Rheinhold Pittius, R&D manager for the retarder division while Andrea Mailänder, head of marketing listens on.
Winfried Dressler, GM of the Retarder product group: "If out of control, the elemental forces which ought to be tamed in a truck are released like the outbreak of a volcano".	FleetWatch editor Patrick O'Leary after braving the vicious, dangerous, ominous and life-threatening active volcano that is Mount Etna. Eiish! What we don't do to make a living!

There was some serious trucking hardware on offer for the journalists to test. Doesn't this line-up look great? Don't you just love this industry? Eiish!

Setting off down from the top of Mount Etna in both the trucks I caught a ride in - the Actros 1848 and the Volvo FH16 - put me on a path of new discovery. Certainly the retarder is not new to FleetWatch. However, it has always been looked on as part of the whole rather than as the independent yet integrated technological marvel that it is. On Mount Etna, the focus was on the retarder rather than on the truck as a whole.

I know of the functioning of a retarder but here I was able to see hands-on the reality of drive by finger with both drivers keeping their foot off the service brake pedal and controlling the braking requirements needed to negotiate hair-pin bends on a steep decline by merely flicking the multi-staged retarder lever on the side of the steering column. The accompanying pictures illustrate this. While each truck has different technologies in terms of gearboxes and other components - the I-Shift on the Volvo, the SmartShift on the Actros - that is no matter here. What does matter is the functioning of the retarder and in both cases, 'amazing' is the apt word to use.
 

VOLVO   Professional driver Giuseppe Piccione with the Volvo FH16 which he took down the mountain with great skill. Watching him at work left no doubt that training is the key to maximising the benefits of a Voith retarder.
Drive by finger is what it was all about especially with Cruise Control on. But don't be fooled into thinking it's too easy. There's more to it than merely flicking a switch and again, I stress the need for full and comprehensive training.	No Brakes! Not once during the entire descent did Giuseppe put his foot on the brake pedal. In effect, this keeps the service brakes cold and fully operational in case of an emergency. This is a huge safety plus.

Feeling of total control
Driving becomes effortless and there is a feeling of being in total control. Further peace of mind comes from knowing that you have a back-up in the form of cold, fully operational service brakes in the event of an emergency. And because of the fact that the Voith Retarder has its own oil supply system, the operating medium can be used up to its highest permissible operating temperature range.

It may seem an irony that speed and braking is mentioned in the same sentence but one of the benefits of using a retarder is that higher average speeds are achieved over a trip. In a test conducted over a distance of 3 164 kms from Italy to Germany, it was shown that not only was there a 70% reduction in the use of the service brake as well as 36% fewer gear shifts but there was also a 5,9% increase in average speed. 

More pertinent in line with the Mount Etna exercise was a test conducted in Spain over a 4.8km test route with a maximum downward gradient of 7% over an altitude difference of 290 metres. Here an 85% reduction of service brake operations and a 56% increase in average speed was achieved. It's all about constant driving speed which the retarder helps to achieve - especially down steep gradients such as Mount Etna.
 

Mercedes
Driving down Mount Etna is easy going when using the combined driving/braking cruise control lever on the steering column of the Mercedes-Benz Actros 1848. Five braking stages are available to decelerate the vehicle. The electronic braking management system activates the engine brake and Voith Retarder from the lowest braking effect in stage 1 up to maximum retardation in stage 5. It's all good stuff this.

There are so many more advantages to speak of and Voith presented these, once again, in an innovative way when, after the driving tests, we proceeded higher first by cable car, then by Unimog, then by foot right to the mouth of the volcano. We got the afternoon shift for this part of the exercise and by then, the morning sun had had been replaced by a raging snow-storm (a bit of exaggeration for the kids).

Right up there on top of this desolated, wind and snow-swept mountain peak, Voith had positioned a number of model demonstrations to spell out the numerous side-benefits of using retarders. One worth mentioning is the environmental benefit. Depending on application and topography, the dust produced from brake pads over a lifetime of 1,5-million kms of a truck equates to 36 to 72 kgs with a retarder fitted. Without a retarder, it reaches an incredible 180 to 360 kgs. Now there's an interesting fact.

I wish I had more space as there's so much more to tell. Suffice to say that this trip convinced me, without a doubt, that retarders are the way to go. Safety benefits, cost benefits, environmental benefits and many more benefits all accrue - some immediately, others over time. With our accident record and the pressure to drive longer, faster and harder, a retarder is an essential from whichever way you look at it.
 

Factory, Munich
	And this is what a Voith Retarder looks like. The simple looks of this model HV 115 don't do justice to its role as a marvel of modern technology when in operation on a truck.
A visit to Voith Turbo's factory in Munich highlighted a commitment to engineering excellence. Kurt Pappe (top pic), GM of the retarder manufacturing department, stresses that precision engineering means regular quality audits on the line. Pride in workmanship is evident at all the workstations in the factory. Again, it's all good stuff!

Footnote: My grateful thanks to Bruce Dickson, Divisional Director of Voith Turbo in South Africa, as well as to the team from Voith Turbo in Germany who put it all together, for exposing FleetWatch and thereby its readers to an incredible component that makes up such an incredible part of truck's functionality. Particular thanks to Friedrich Fuchs, area manager for Africa, for his amazing hospitality and never-ending patience as we tried to find Nigel.