Jeremy Clarkson - Motorworld

The national pastime up there, apart from going to the bank twice a day, is statistics. Chat to an Icelander for more than a minute and you’ll learn that they’ve produced more chess grand masters and Miss Worlds than any other nation on earth. But this is not surprising because all the men have beards and look like Nordic facsimiles of Greek philosophers, and the women look like angels. Björk is the only one who’s odd, and they’ve exported her.

But you need to delve into their motoring culture to get the real picture — to see just how mad this place is. Take a look in the history books to see what I mean.

The first car arrived on Icelandic soil in 1904 but with no infrastructure and no spare parts it soon died. However, rather than simply throw it away, its owner would push it up a hill and charge inquisitive visitors a small fee for the privilege of rolling down to the bottom in it.

There was even a car factory once. Back in 1941, a ship carrying 104 kits was on its way from America to Sweden, where they would be made into Dodge saloons, when it became stranded in Iceland because of the war.

An Icelandic mechanic was dispatched to the States to get a job in the Dodge factory while a small factory was built in Reykjavik. By the time it was ready, he knew how the cars were made and he did just that in less than a year. Sadly, in rather less time than that, most had been eaten by the winter weather so that today only one remains in active service… as a chicken run.

Then there’s motorsport which, until recently, was impossible because road-traffic laws applied everywhere. You could have built a racetrack but it would have been subjected to the blanket 70kph speed limit.

However, in 1981, they changed the law and Iceland went motorsport barmy, to the point that today, every weekend, central Iceland echoes to the sound of what are by far the most powerful race cars in the known world.

To the casual observer, they’re Jeeps, but this is like calling a Michelin three-star lunch a snack.

They have Detroit V8 engines and four-wheel drive, but that’s about all they have in common with what you see cruising up and down the King’s Road on a Saturday. The tyres, for a kickoff, are two feet wide and equipped with scoop-like flaps to give extra grip. The chassis are massively altered too, elongated and beefed up so that they stay in one piece after a 100-foot drop.

Then there are the engines, which must be capable of getting the car up the 100-foot climb in the first place. They are, basically, tuned V8s of 5- or 7-litre capacity but, for that little extra something, when you hit the gas hard, ultra-cold nitrous oxide is brought into play, giving a total of 900 horsepower.

To put that in perspective, Michael Shoemaker’s Benetton develops somewhere in the region of 600 bhp. These Icelandic Jeeps are absolutely terrifying, a point that was hammered home when Gisli Jonsson, the current champion, took me out for a spin.

The course is laid out over what, in Britain, we’d call a quarry. And what you do is drive up the walls, the idea being that the first part of the climb is nearly vertical and the last ten to twelve feet, completely sheer. And you get no run-up.

Once at the top, you turn round, come halfway down again and then, turn round on a slope that looks virtually vertical, crab along it and then go straight up again. To describe it as impossible is to underestimate the seriousness of the task.

Gisli agreed that some of the slopes were, indeed, out of the question, but added, ‘We’ll give them a try anyway.’ Then he hit three-quarter power and with the wheels spinning like a washing machine on its final spin cycle we rocketed skywards. And, as the front wheels hit the vertical part of the wall, his right foot welded the pedal to the metal, the nitro kicked in, my kidneys exploded and whoosh, we were at the top.

Except ‘whoosh’ is the wrong word. I have stood underneath a hovering Harrier. I have heard a brace of Tornadoes do a combat-power military take off. I’ve seen Judas Priest live and I’ve been in a Formula One pit when they’ve taken a V10 to 17,000 rpm, but these sounds are whisper-quiet compared to Gisli’s Jeep. We’re talking bird song at the World Pile-Driver Competition.

With such a massive assault being mounted on one sense, the others go into shutdown, which is a good thing because my eyes simply refused to believe what was happening.

I’d been told that the nitro needs to come in at the exact moment the rear wheels hit the vertical part of the slope, causing them to bounce away from the rock face and thus, hopefully, causing the car to rock over the lip. It didn’t make much sense at the time and having done it, it makes even less now.

But there was worse to come. On the way down, Gisli swung the wheel over to the left so that we drove across this sheer rock face.

He had no gear-changing to worry about — it’s automatic — but even so, things often go wrong. Cars roll down the banks all the time but that said, in ffiteen years, no competitor has ever been injured. This, frankly, was cold comfort, because I was scared out of my mind — and I’m talking about scared in the bowel-loosening sense. The last time that someone was this scared, he was about eight and he was having a nightmare about some headless monsters eating his mum and dad.

Three things stopped me from asking Gisli to stop. First, I’m British. Second, I couldn’t make myself heard. And third, I was sitting on my arms to stop them flailing about if we rolled. So I simply sat there, wishing to God that I was an accountant.

And then it was over and I went for a ride on a Yamaha Wave Runner.

Nothing odd in that. You did it a hundred times when you were on holiday. Aha. But have you done it in an Icelandic lake, while wearing jeans? No? I thought not.

There was a bit of a wind and, therefore, because it was a big lake, a bit of a chop, but there was nothing to warn me about what was to come. What came the first time I hit a wave hard was a series of large icicles which ploughed into my face, at exactly the same time that a sub-zero fist took hold of my genitals and squeezed. This was cold like you simply would not believe.

‘Yes,’ said my Icelandic guide later. ‘Ten people died of hypothermia last year after they fell in there.’

Worse was to come when he introduced me to the fantastically named Sudberdur Gudbergson who, two years ago, rode his snowmobile to an island 1.2 km off the coast. Now, it should be explained at this juncture that a snowmobile is designed for use on water in a rather more solid state. A snowmobile has all the buoyancy of a cathedral. If you put a snowmobile on water, you will need a new snowmobile, and in Iceland, that would cost about the same as Blenheim Palace.

Sudberdur Gudbergson’s would cost even more because it is tuned to develop 180 bhp, which makes it more powerful than your Golf GTi. In terms of power to weight, it is more powerful than a Lamborghini Diablo.

To make it suitable for use on water, Sud, as I shall call him, had simply taped over the radiator grilles — overheating is rarely a problem in Iceland — and that was it. ‘Have a go,’ he said, ‘only remember that, no matter what, keep it on full power. If you lift off for a second, she will go down.’

Now, I rode it up and down the beach a couple of times and discovered that flat out equated to about 120 mph, which was awesome enough on dry land. Could there be something more terrifying than Gisli’s Jeep?

Yes.

To begin with I kept to the shallows, which enabled me to learn that the two skis up front are no substitute for a rudder and the tank track at the back is not really a very good propeller.

But what the hell. I swung it round, hit a max and plunged onto the water on a course that would take me right across to the other side of the lake, half a mile away. The speed started to bleed off immediately and the skidoo began to rock from side to side but I knew that to lift my thumb from the throttle would mean a loss in momentum and frozen knackers all over again.