BAKERY WORKER AND PALS CONQUER 7,450-MI RALLY IN BATTERED CLIO

A WELSH bakery worker and his friends have completed one of the toughest motoring challenges on the planet.

- STAFF REPORTER

The team and their £500 car at the Mongol Rally start line

George Loftus, 27, a senior development technologist at the Jones Village Bakery in Wrexham, teamed up with pals Tom Suter, Jon Fowell and Hua Ying Baker to take on the mammoth 7,450-mile Mongol Rally.

Along the way they overcame a catalogue of breakdowns, including two broken axles, and were even banned from entering Tajikistan because their car's steering wheel was on the “wrong side”

The gruelling, Top Gear-style adventure has been described as “motoring stupidity on a grand scale”, taking them from Prague in the Czech Republic all the way to Oskemen in Kazakhstan, crossing 15 countries in 43 days.

The rules were simple cars must have engines no larger than 1.3 litres and each team had to raise at least £500 for the environmental charity Cool Earth.

But the journey was anything but simple for the group, who called themselves No Half Sends a slang term for no half-measures.

Their £500 Renault Clio 2009 Sport Tourer already boasting 138,000 miles on the clock before it even left home took a battering.

At one point its rear axle snapped on the Turkey-Georgia border. At another, the team were forced to strip out the back seats to lighten the load and give the struggling motor a fighting chance of reaching the finish line.