THIS was my favorite car though.
Prawn will like this picture.
We went to the bar, all got **** faced and woke up at 5:30 the next morning.
****! Snow. Lots of f**king snow!
Snow, is not good when you are going ice racing. What you want, is ice.
So, a warm bowl of Swedish Museli.
And off we went, to probably the most famous test and training facility in the world of WRC. Anttila!!!!
A couple of cars were bought up there for me to drive.
After some messing about, the rest of the group went off for some snowmobiling whilst we went ice racing!
Actual leg of the Swedish rally. Uhhuh...
Lee, bless him. Decided he was going to wear trackie bottoms, trainers and tucked in socks. It was -18...
This is Leezo, on a 90m deep frozen lake. That's f**king massive. In trackie bottoms. What. A. Legend.
Off we went then, in my new favorite car in the world ever. An M3 converted E36 compact ice race car.
Don't let the blandness of it put you off, or the **** wheels. This is a full on 100 grand+ race car.
M3 ice racer - YouTube
This, was by far my favorite car ever. INSANE. I love it, I want one. I'm buying one.
I went for the Scoobaroo, which only had winter tires on it...Not race tires.
This was maybe an error. It was quick as f**k, 4WD and very well built. It was also very tail happy haha.
Leezo swapping out of the M3 after some stonking laps.
As you can see by the snow build up, around the wheel arches. We were racing in TERRIBLE conditions.
Light was fading fast, not due to time of day, but the amount of snow fall. And there was so much snow it was almost impossible to see the cut in the ice/where the snow track had been cleared. And if you came off, you'd be in 5 feet of snow and waiting for the ice to be cleared so a 5 ton tractor could come and dig you out. So nobody wanted to crash.
Now, this will sound terrible. But up until this point, I was f**king awesome. I was so good at it, that the instructors asked me if I would like to come back with them to help on the trips next year. Things were good! And in my mind, I'd found something that I wanted to do. I'd been planning on buying rally cars all day.
However, inevitably. I had a rather large crash.
All day I'd been driving a 400bhp Subaru, and a 340bhp Maf-less M3 compact. So you'd think, getting into a 1.6 Zetec Ford Focus race car it would be a walk in the park? After all, it had 5000Kr per corner ice racing tires on it, and I'm all about FWD. Right?
Denied.
I got in the car, stalled it immediately. Everyone laughed.
I spun it on the first corner.
Went round the second corner at 40kmh.
And crashed it hugely on the third.
Tits.
Lake closed, sat in a Focus burried 4/5feet deep in snow so I couldn't open the door.
The lake was closed, all cars pulled off and the tractor came on to get me.
We pulled the focus out, cleaned the hard packed snow out of the engine bay, steering arms etc etc. Then whilst I did that everybody got on for the last half hour.
EVERYONE hated me because they'd come all that way, and I'd lost them loads of laps. I was pretty suicidal.
So I drove back up a leg of the Swedish WRC, which is beautifully prepared for the coming weeks when the WRC descends on Sweden.
I was sad, I'd made a total tit of myself, damaged the car and I only had myself to blame.
So naturally, I blamed it on a sticking throttle stopping me from getting the weight to the front wheels. This was a good idea I thought.
It clearly wasn't a sticking throttle, and my race drivers excuse lost me multiple man points. So I just claimed I saw a bear run out in front of me and I swerved to avoid it.
Which is exactly what Ken Block said when he wrote off his Fiesta at Antilla lake.
f**king bear.
Having disgraced myself, and made a total **** of myself. I decided to eat some Moose Lasagna (which was amazing)and then go f**k about on Snowmobiles with Lee.
This was fun!
Snowbiking - YouTube
It was getting late and we needed to get back to Oslo.
So we packed up, said our thank yours and goodbyes, exchanged numbers with multiple international stars and parted company.