Spring may have technically already started in Pridnestrovia, but a thin layer of snow still covered the majority of the closed city of Myrilsk when the first of three tests by the Urotovsky-Gatutin Motorsports Division was set to begin at the team's own private test track was scheduled to start. Myrilsk lay at the foot of the Krav Mountains, right at the border between the states of Transnistria and the Krav Mountains. It had started off as a small village for miners looking for gold and other precious metals at the beginning of the 19th century before being almost abandoned once the small deposits at the location had been played out and larger gold deposits were discovered further northwest. By the time of the Communist Revolution of 1916, only an estimated five to fifteen people lived in the settlement of Myrilsk. However, ten years later, both the population of the settlement and the settlement itself would grow a hundredfold when the central government in Tiraspol decided to establish a collective farm around Myrilsk to take advantage of the flatlands around the place. Food crops such as grains and corn were planted around Myrilsk to help feed the country's growing population, but suboptimal temperatures and poor-quality soil in the area meant that the Myrilsk collective farm was never able to meet the quota expected from it by Tiraspol. The central government finally decided to close the Myrilsk collective farm in 1938 after seven consecutive years of steadily declining yields, and that would have probably been the end of Myrilsk as a place for human habitation were it not for two things.
The first thing that saved Myrilsk was the creation of a railroad line between the bauxite and iron mines in Vladikrav with the port town of Pridnestrovskaya Gavan. The railroad passed through Myrilsk due to the geology of the area, allowing it to become a hub for raw materials coming from the Krav Mountains and goods shipped in from Prigava (the local short name for Pridnestrovskaya Gavan). The second thing that saved Myrilsk from becoming a ghost town was the creation of the Urotovsky-Gatutin General Machine Building Enterprise. One of the two founders of the company, Mikhail Abramovich Gatutin, was from Myrilsk, and when Tiraspol decided to close down the collective farm there, Gatutin managed to convince both his partner Mikhail Ustinovich Urotovsky and the central government to set up their first factory in Myrilsk in 1938. Fields that were once dedicated to the growth of wheat became the site of UrGa Factory Number One, and just four months after the last stalk was harvested from Myrilsk, the first truck drove off of the UrGa assembly line. Three years later, however, the production capabilities of the Myrilsk factory would be put to the ultimate test.
The Grand Duchy of Ixania invaded Pridnestrovia in the autumn of 1941 "to halt and combat the spread of godless communism throughout the region". The Pridnestrovian Army was taken by surprise by the initial invasion, losing almost four hundred tanks and almost a thousand other tracked and wheeled vehicles in just the first two months of the invasion. All companies in the country were ordered to shift production to vehicles which were vital to the war effort such as tanks and trucks. UrGa was one of those companies. Mikhail Gatutin ordered Factory Number One to increase truck production and also approved the construction of a second factory alongside the first one to augment production. But when the company received blueprints for the T-34 tank from the central government, Gatutin took this as an order to produce this type of tank for the Motherland and made it so. By the end of the war in 1947, UrGa was the third largest producer of battle tanks for the Pridnestrovian Army, rolling out 4,200 T-34s from their factories.
As a new decade came in, Pridnestrovia found itself getting dragged into a cold war with the nation of Abanhfleft, and Tiraspol decided that it needed first strike capability against the Antarctic country so it called upon its companies to present ballistic missile prototypes upon which Pridnestrovia could launch its nascent nuclear power. Mikhail Gatutin created the Gatutin Space and Rocketry Design Bureau and built a third factory in Myrilsk to manufacture his missile design should it be the one accepted into service by the central government. It was indeed Gatutin's Ga-36 missile which was selected by Tiraspol to become the backbone of its ICBM force, and UrGa received an initial order from the government of fifty missiles with an option for fifty more once the initial order was fulfilled. Due to the sensitive nature of the missiles being produced there, Myrilsk was pronounced a "city of strategic national importance" by the central government in 1955, meaning all travel in and out of the city was restricted only to the engineers and workers assigned to missile production, along with their families. Foreigners were not allowed into Myrilsk altogether. And because non-essential travel to and from Myrilsk became highly restricted upon becoming a closed city, the railroad between Vladikrav and Prigava had to be diverted elsewhere, specifically the city of Verkhovyansk sixty kilometers north of Myrilsk.
Myrilsk remained a closed city for over eighty years after, and only very recently were foreigners allowed into the city once again. Even then, these foreigners could only enter Myrilsk after special permission had been obtained from the Ministry of the Interior and the Committee for State Security, and the foreigners would only be able to get that permission if they had been invited there by the Urotovsky-Gatutin Motorsports Division. Out of twelve invitations, nine drivers accepted the offer to try out for the team, but one of the invitees, David Findlay of the Grearish Union, informed the team a few days before the trials that he was backing out of the UrGa trials after he had accepted an offer to drive for Kaylan-Domerton of Togonistan. UrGa was now down to eight applicants for their vacant second seat because of Findlay's withdrawal. The Pridnestrovian team didn't want to rush their decision with regards to filling that second seat, and they believed that three trials across three different styles of track would help them make a better decision than last time.
The top people in the Motorsports Division (Vasily Gatutin, Konstantin Rezansov, Marina Smirnitskaya, and Taras Matviyenko) greeted the trialists as they arrived at UrGa's headquarters in Myrilsk. They were wearing fur coats and ushankas to keep them warm, and Vasily was aware that they must have looked like stereotypical Slavic Communists in their current attire. Nevertheless, he personally greeted each prospective driver as they arrived and shook hands with their companions. Once he was sure that everyone who had accepted the invitation had arrived, Vasily welcomed them all to Myrilsk once again and led them through the entire facility, acting as their tour guide. "Here you can see the heart of Urotovsky-Gatutin," he said as he led them through the three main factory buildings. "As you can see below us, our production is currently focused on civilian and military trucks, with a slight focus on civilian production for both the local market and foreign exports. But should the need arise, we can easily shift production towards military vehicles such as tanks and armored personnel carriers and ramp up our production rates, just like we did in the Second Ixanian War of 2002-04 and the Szavodan War of 2008. This is why we are still considered a city of strategic national importance even though we don't produce Pridnestrovia's ballistic missiles anymore; we can easily replenish Army vehicle losses once we enter into a war footing. If you want to see where we make our nuclear weapons though, you might want to go to Ozyorsk or Zheleznogorsk!" Vasily's attempt at humor seemingly flew over everyone's heads though, so he just shrugged and moved on. Besides, it was now an open secret that Pridnestrovia produced weapons-grade uranium and plutonium in Ozyorsk and Zheleznogorsk even if their operations had been scaled back massively after 1992 and other secret cities had taken over nuclear weapons production from the aforementioned places.
Vasily and the visitors moved on to the museum, where various items related to the history of UrGa were on display, such as the last T-34 to roll off their assembly line in the First Great Patriotic War ("We would have wanted to display the first T-34 that we ever made, but it was destroyed by the Volkssturm at Wewelsburg in 1946!") and a scale model of the Feniks rocket, a rocket based on the Ga-36 ballistic missile and the same rocket that sent the first Pridnestrovian cosmonaut into space ("It's twice the size of a Neptunas missile but has only half the range, which is bloody strange if you ask me!"). Then they went to the Wall of Remembrance, on which was carved the names of all Pridnestrovian Armed Forces personnel who had been employed by UrGa who fell in the line of duty in all the wars that Pridnestrovia had taken part, from the First Ixanian War to the current intervention in Ceroat. 248 names in total, with portraits and pictures beside those names if available. Vasily lingered upon this wall longer than the museum displays, gazing upon the more recent names on the wall. Some of those names were of friends he had known in school, others during his mandatory national service. There were some that he had met on the factory floor and in the engineering places, and others whom he knew worked for the company but hadn't seen in person. And yet seeing each and every single one of their names on the Wall of Remembrance seemed to affect Vasily as if it was his whole family whose names were on that wall.
And then it was time to start the test sessions. The cold spring temperatures at Myrilsk didn't seem to faze the drivers, and they all set decent lap times for the one-lap speed test. There was considerably more variance between the drivers once it was time for the one-shot qualifying session however, and the young Adabian driver Shalmaneser Kalhu took pole over Kyidawa Sherpa by over seven tenths of a second. Kalhu wasn't able to take advantage of his pole position however, falling all the way down to P6 while Kyidawa took the checkered flag. The trialists were allowed a few days' rest at Myrilsk before they were flown off to the island province of Karavatsenin for the second test session at the Afanasiy Benin Memorial Autodrom, near the provincial capital of Beledor. The second test session was pretty much the Aaron Deering show, with the driver from United Adaikes acing all three sessions from practice to race. Then it was off to Pepuza in the northern Hatay Socialist State where, despite all the forecasts predicting hot and dry weather, torrential rain poured down upon the desert city and almost forced the cancellation of the practice session. Eventually though, they found a small break in the rain where they could safely host a session, but it had to be cut short after just an hour since the rain intensified once again. Beepee's Ryden Solow was the fastest driver in a rain-shortened session where everyone was within nine-tenths of each other. He wasn't able to carry that form over to the qualifying session, but Solow still posted a decent showing via a P3 start for the race. The Mongolian driver from TJUN-ia, Batu Tüvshinbayar, took pole at Pepuza and had a fine battle against Bollonich's Sullivan Joyner, and it was Joyner who would eventually walk away with the win, while Daniel Rae sneaked into second place and left Tüvshinbayar in third.
With all that data gathered, it was now time for UrGa to make their decision. Aaron Deering was a driver who had been flying right under UrGa's radar until he clinched all three sessions at Beledor, and he was the most consistent driver out of all of them. However, Deering was consistent only at the track slanted towards more aggression, and on the other tracks, Deering had been up and down. Daniel Rae was a driver whom UrGa had been monitoring ever since he got his WGP2 license, and while he didn't ace any of the sessions, he was in the mix for most of them, the notable exception being the Beledor sessions. Skiia Vialiv, a driver whom UrGa had had an eye on since the last season of WGP2, didn't impress in her second try at claiming that second seat, leaving Yakov Yurievsky feeling slightly more vindicated in telling the team to choose Harry Zoomtwat instead. And Shalmaneser Kalhu had quite a number of slip-ups, but there were other times where he made up for it, especially in the two times he charged through the field at Beledor and Pepuza. Vasily Gatutin had already made his choice, but he wanted to know if everyone else had made the same choice, or a different one, so he asked for a vote with his associates. He asked them to write down their choice of driver on a piece of paper which he would then collect and read. To his surprise, the votes were evenly divided, and he didn't expect some of them to pick the driver that they had picked. But it was indeed Shalmaneser Kalhu to whom UrGa were going to offer their second seat.
