Mazda Route3: Day Two

Contrary to popular belief, the Brest Fortress is not the latest sports bra from Berlei. It's a bona fide WWII icon and a war memorial that is stunning in its scale -- both in terms of its physical size and what took place there.

The fortress includes a barracks that was originally 1.8km long and boasted 500 rooms and lodgings for 12,000 troops. Shaped in a ring, the barracks are built of specially fired super-hard red bricks. In addition to housing the men, the buildings formed an important part of the Brest encampment's fortifications.

There were even bigger structures made of earth with the same mega-bricks as backbones that protected the centre part of the fort. Pillboxes and aggressively shaped berms were strategically placed at the furthest extremities of the citadel. Oh, and to make things harder for anyone intending to take the fort, there are rivers to cross amid the fight.

Today the Brest Fortress is also home to massive Soviet-era sculptures. The main piece looks like an XXXL version of the Hulk is breaking out of a grey four-storey office block. Subtle it is not…

If the Brest Fortress demonstrates that the old Soviet Union made it hard to enter uninvited, it’s now clear the current Belarus authorities have adopted the opposite strategy. Today they made it near impossible for the Mazda Route3 crew and cars to leave! The irony that the border control facility was just a stone’s throw away from the fortress itself was not lost on many.

Border crossings are a thing of the past in Western Europe and Down Under the closest most of us ever come to the concept was having to hastily scoff apples ahead of the Albury fruit fly checkpoint. They are still alive and well in Eastern Europe – border crossings that is, not fruit flies.

The Belarus-Polish border has a reputation as problematic. As I write this in the comfort of a Warsaw hotel room at midnight, four of the Mazda Route3 crew and three of the cars are still there! And we rolled up to the border crossing at around 11.00am.

That’s not the worst it can be. In 2004, Mazda Route3 head guide and facilitator Rainer Flesch was stuck at the crossing for 37 hours -- and that was after an appropriate amount of 'priority dollars' were negotiated. The slow lane took 72 hours!

Mazda won’t post anything on its blog tonight just in case… in case it makes it harder to get the cars across… Can’t imagine the Belarus authorities are monitoring motoring.com.au though…

Our convoy arrived at the Belarus side of the border at around 11:30am and 13 hours later we’re still down two new Mazda3s -- unable to be cleared through customs. It wasn't until almost 4:00pm that the rest of the convoy was together again and ready to take on the Polish side of the process.

Fortunately that process was more streamlined and after assuring the Polish police representative that the head-up display on the new 3 wasn’t some form of radar detector by 5.00pm (one hour time zone change) we were on the road to Warsaw.

The delay kiboshed a southern detour to the market town of Kazimierz Doiny. But better roads and sat-nav systems that worked again (no map data is available in Belarus) meant we could put the hammer down. We were towelling off the 3s by 9:00pm

Over five hours of sitting still gave me plenty of time to take in the new 3's cabin and there's no doubt it’s a huge improvement on the old model. Arguably it's also a step forward in terms of design and execution from even the new Mazda6 and CX-5.

There's a very real European feel to the dash and ancillaries. The central data screen does its best to emulate an iThingie and the instrument cluster itself is sharp and well designed. The graphics on the centre screen are top-notch. It’s a shame then that the odo and other trip computer displays are old-school dot matrix (or near enough).

Our White Russian #4 car had a few little glitches in its operating system which my co-driver, Mazda development product evaluation engineer Florian Callies, identified as early beta-version issues.

Overall, items like navigation integration and Bluetooth performance were at a high level. The park assist graphic was a little slow to cancel itself at times, but we'll wait until we experience a series-production Mazda 3 before we cast too many nasturtiums.

This writer is on Twitter @petrolhedonist

Route3 with Mazda: From Minsk to Frankfurt