Motorworld

by Jeremy Clarkson

For the same reason, you can leave your car and your house unlocked. When I asked a policeman how much car crime there is in Iceland, he genuinely didn’t know what I was on about.

  So you have more time to worry about murder then? And that got him too. In Iceland, in the last ten years, there have only been a dozen cases of homicide and most of those were crimes of passion — the type where Plod arrives to find the wife dead and the husband sobbing away in a corner, smoking gun in hand and explaining to anyone who will listen that he didn’t mean to kill her.

  It’s not all sweetness and light, though. For the most part, people are pleased to welcome foreigners who’ve come to do something other than fish, but there’s a significant number who reckon you’re gate-crashing their party.

  They’re living up there, on their funny rock, having a ball in a crime-free, stable and fantastically rich country and they don’t want yobbos from the real world sticking their noses in. More than once I was told to ‘fuck off back to America’.

  I stayed though, because Iceland is my kinda town.

  It is four-fifths the size of England but they have the biggest glacier in the northern hemisphere, 100 active volcanoes and rivers that change course every day. There are no trees and it’s not unknown for new islands to spring up off the coast from time to time.

  Iceland is located right where the American and European continental shelves meet and that makes it the world’s biggest geothermal playground too.

  A lot of the rock in Iceland is warm to the touch because, just a few hundred feet below the surface, it’s still molten. Steam pours out of the ground and huge chunks of the place smell worse than the Japanese underground on a bad day.

  Then there’s the blue lagoon. Not far from the main airport at Keflavik, where the American air force is based, you’ll find a hot lake of the most improbable turquoise. Below the surface, things go even more bonkers. Here the water is so hot that the whole country gets free baths, central heating and power without having to burn a single hydrocarbon.

  One man told me that Iceland has enough free and eco-friendly power under its surface to keep Western Europe going for a thousand years. Then he fell off his bar stool.

  And then there’s the town of Geyser which has given its name, the world over, to a huge water spout. The great geyser hasn’t strutted its stuff for years but there is a selection of smaller ones that gurgle and slurp away most of the time and, every seven minutes, shoot a plume of boiling water 70 feet into the air. It would be quite a sight in, say, Barnsley, but in Iceland you might even call it dull.

  This is because to get there, you’ll have driven past Gull Foss, a waterfall of such drama and power that your ears start to bleed. My eyebrows went green too.

  Then there’s the spongy moss which has turned a monster lava field into the world’s biggest mattress, the black desert and the complete absence of agriculture. Eighty per cent of Iceland’s mad interior is common land, given to the people by the world’s oldest parliament.

  And remember, I’m talking here about a people who sleep all winter and party all summer, a people who, by any sense of the word, are crazy.

  They just don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the world. There is no Icelandic word for ‘please’. Until very recently, beer was banned, even though spirits were not. There was no television on Thursdays. They don’t even have proper surnames.

  When you’re born, you are given a name by your parents, which is normal enough except it must come from a government-approved list.

  Your surname is your father’s Christian name with ‘son’ or ‘dottir’ tacked on the end. So, I would be called Jeremy Edwardson and my daughter, Emily Jeremydottir.

  Weird stuff, but not as weird as the prices. In 1994, when we were there, petrol was nearly £5 a gallon. A bottle of wine in a pizza joint was £65 and dinner for two in one of the endless fish restaurants cost the same as four television licence fees. I’ve framed my hotel bill and it now hangs in the hall to amuse visitors.

  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.

  I guess I was down to about 50 mph halfway across when the strangest thing happened. Gisli came past in his Jeep. I’m not kidding. I felt pretty manly and hirsute on my lightweight skidoo but here was a man driving his 900-bhp Jeep on water.

  They tried to explain the physics of it later but frankly, I kept trying to match the man’s face with the boat race on the Turin shroud. I guess if Jesus wanted to come to earth again for a bit of a poke around, Iceland makes sense — lots of fishing, no one bats an eyelid when you walk on water, bikers who look like disciples anyway. It’s the perfect cover.

  And should Pilot Pontiusson come round with some centurions, lots of places to hide.

  Iceland’s interior is deserted, by which I mean no crofter’s huts, no pylons, no people. Think about that. Imagine being able to go from Newcastle upon Tyne to Oxford without seeing any evidence at all of man’s existence. This is one big chunk of nature.

  And the biggest chunk of the lot is the glacier. Vatnajokull is bigger than Yorkshire.

  I guess it’s time to get all Blue Peter-ish now and explain that you can’t simply drive onto this kilometre-thick chunk of ice all on your own. You need guides, satellite navigation equipment and some very, very special vehicles.

  They’re basically big four-wheel-drive vans which have been described by one American magazine as the best snow vehicles in the world, and you can’t argue with that, as they cruise over crevices so deep that mammoths still live at the bottom. You also can’t argue when you see how much they cost — £60,000 is by no means uncommon.

  I should explain that every square metre of Iceland has been plotted and, with the right satnav equipment, you can drive across the middle in a car with blacked-out windows.

  But a glacier moves. Your pet satellite can tell you which way you’re going but not what’s between you and your destination. It’s no good thinking, as you plummet down a kilometre-deep crack, ‘That’s odd. This wasn’t here yesterday.’

  Plus, you need to be mindful of the weather. Not even in the uppermost reaches of Scotland’s taller bits will you find changeable conditions like this. You can be sunbathing one minute and dead the next. We’re a few miles from the Arctic Circle here and they have blizzards which would give Michael Fish a heart attack. Sometimes, they’re even more powerful than his jackets.

  So why, then, do Icelanders bother to go up there? Well, first of all, they’re mad, and second, they go because there’s no reason not to.

  Why, for instance, go into the African bush when there’s a better-than-evens chance of not getting out with all your legs on? Why climb Everest and why, in British terms, have a barbecue when you have an oven?

  The first thing you do before hitting the ice is drop the tyre pressure down to just two pounds per square inch, so that the rubber makes a bigger footprint on the snow. And don’t worry about it coming off the wheel because you only need a Zippo and some lighter fluid to put it back on again. What you do is spray the butane into the tyre and light it. The resultant explosion pops the tyre back on the rim and gives just enough pressure to carry on. And carry on you must because journey’s end is a huge slash in the ice.

  And to give you an idea about how huge, you could play hide-and-seek in there with Canary Wharf and not find it.

  I don’t want to get all religious here but when you stand on the edge of this absurd crater you do start to wonder a little bit about the puniness of man. I mean, not even the most powerful nuclear bomb could do this. The power that created it is beyond the ken of even our most sophisticated computer. We really are pretty pathetic and I suppose that if I lived near it, and all Iceland’s other wonders, I might have a slightly lower opinion of myself.

  Perhaps this is why Icelanders, more than anyone else I’ve ever met, live so close to the edge.

  Either that or they have the fishing industry to thank. I mean, if a country relies for its huge wealth on fish, which can only be caught by ploughing the North Atlantic in small boats, playtime is going to be pretty special.

  I also think, though, that quite by chance we’d stumbled on a nation that simply likes cars. Certainly, it’s hard to see the internal combustion engine as a threat to mankind up there.

  When you stand in a normal ci
ty street, and the whole thing is clogged up with tail pipes, smoky buses and the interminable din from a million diesels, it’s easy to see why the environmental argument can get a toehold.

  But in Iceland, one exhaust pipe on a glacier the size of Yorkshire doesn’t seem so bad.

  Then we have the queues. It’s easy to see the appeal of public transport in Britain where every motorway is clogged, and every B-road alternative a washboard route directly to the osteopath.

  They have queues in Iceland too, but never so severely that you’d think about taking the bus instead. And anyway, you can always call the transport minister whose number — and that of the President herself — appears in the phonebook.

  ‘Oh people call me up all the time,’ he says. ‘If there’s the slightest problem, they’re straight on the phone to me. This is a small place and everyone knows everyone else. Just because you work in the transport ministry doesn’t mean you stop knowing people.’

  The transport ministry needs to be defined though. Put it like this. When he goes out for lunch, it’s closed.

  Sure, he has the planes, the buses and the cars to worry about but, thankfully, no trains. There are none.

  However, outside California, Iceland does have the highest car-ownership levels in the world and the roads have to keep pace with a demand that just won’t slow down.

  To cope, they have Road One, which circumnavigates Iceland and is paved for very nearly its entire length. The best stretch is in the south where you’ll find the Big Bridge which was paid for by Iceland’s lottery and is fashioned from wood — odd in a country without any trees. Well there used to be some, but the original Irish settlers — Reg and Vic — chopped them all down.

  There is no Road Two but there is a myriad of unnumbered and unpaved tracks which litter the coastal plains. On these you should be very, very careful indeed because Iceland’s growing band of rally drivers use them for practice in their homemade cars.

  In Britain they’d call it joy-riding and the transport minister would appear on television with a stern face. But hey, this is Iceland and the transport minister thinks it’s OK so long as they’re careful.