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"

-- 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."