DECEMBER 2003

 

              Vikings at Play - Sport

In Iceland, crowds thrill to the perfect face plant.

Anyone can see it: This whole deal is completely out of control.

It is a chill, drizzling August Sunday, and we're standing at the foot of Iceland's barren Stapafell—Old Norse for "Mt. Stapa." Up to our Timberlands in black volcanic ash, we watch one rorty, nitrous-oxide-jazzed 950-hp 4x4 after another try to claw and clamber up the forehead of yet another nearly vertical wall. Inebriated Chevy V-8s bellow and rage. Paddle-treaded tires blast roostertails of ash. The noise and dirt and violence make the World of Outlaws look like a concours d'élégance in Connecticut.

One minute a driver tries to leap over a steep verge—but lands short. Now he is high-centered 90 feet straight up, wheels spinning pointlessly.

Moments later another driver gets to the middle of the next dirt wall and summons a prodigal roar of horsepower, his front axle aimed at the moon. Engine roaring, balanced on the rear wheels, he tail-walks across the wall like a gut-hooked black marlin, getting nowhere.

Still later, a driver tries something sick at the very top. And goes vertical. Topples. Pitch-poles back down, hat over wallet, until Mutha Physics has had her fill.

Out of control—and it's getting worse.

It is 5 p.m. now, time for the eighth and final course. For four cranium-splitting hours, the drivers have wrestled with steering, throttle, and the will to live, trying to keep their wheels between the embedded tires marking the course. It can't be done—so now and again, out of sheer meanness, someone does it.

But this eighth course is hardest of all. It's meant to be a sort of tiebreaker—and butt breaker. Still, after seven rounds, only six of the original 16 drivers have cried uncle—astounding, considering. The retirees are in the pits receiving nursing, sedation, and spiritual counseling. Lucky them. Course eight is depraved.

Before the run, those drivers willing to look Fate in the eye scramble up the run on all fours for a look. We follow. This godless track has three absolute right-angle walls, each 12 feet straight up, one above the other. Unlike the previous courses, these murderous walls have been cut out of the mountain by bulldozers. No confusion at all—the course is impossible.

The drivers gawk. Nod. Direct descendants of the fierce Norsemen who gave raping and pillaging such a bad name, they are Vikings through and through. They scramble back downhill, grinning. They like the impossible. Lightning in their eyes, they put on helmets. Arm restraints. Climb in.

All right—get back!

The little green flag flaps, and Gunnar Ásgeirsson's Örninn/Besta 4x4 inches forward, Chevy small-block grumbling. His engine makes 750 horsepower, plus 200 more with N2O, nitrous oxide to you. Later in the month, he will assault the Icelandic quarter-mile-on-sand record with 500 additional nitrous horses—1250 total. Oh, my.

His front wheels rotate up the vertical wall. There's a sudden, inexcusable racket, and the Besta shoots halfway up the wall—but crooked, way crooked. Another offensive blast and he's pointed at 9 o'clock, the right-front paddle tire clawing the verge like a side-wheeler climbing Idaho Falls. He slides back down. Bump. You get one try in Icelandic Formula Off-Road (such a sanitary-sounding name for this unsanitary insanity).

Ásgeirsson withdraws, in shame. What he attempted was impossible, but the shameful part is, he failed.

Next comes the efficient little Musso of Haraldur Pétursson, leading the Special class in the Icelandic Championship. "Musso" refers to a Daewoo SUV sold in Iceland but not in the States. In today's field, it is the only V-6. (There are two big-blocks, one of which nuked its transmission on the first run.) But this is not just any V-6. Purchased on eBay, it's a full-spec NASCAR V-6, with all the attendant jeeze-criceness this confers. The green flag flaps. The engine makes a reedy, higher-pitched razzzz. Following in Ásgeirsson's paw prints, the Musso scrambles straight up. Both front wheels strain to the verge—but it high-centers, spewing black grit like a 1920s oil gusher.

Nope. Pétursson retreats.

SigurUur Jónsson's big Toshiba is a rangy, gangly Special-class small-block with 650 horses, plus another 125 horsepower with nitrous, and a second N2O stage of 175 hp, or 950 in all.

Jónsson uses every hoof to bust over the first wall. Scrambling up the steep 40 yards to the second wall, and liking his chances, he hesitates not at all. The front wheels rotate up. The rears follow suit. With a huge blat, the Toshiba goes straight up—no, straight up!—and doesn't stop at the top. Continues 30 feet into the air, all 2100 pounds, like some home-built Saturn 5.

This cannot end well . . .

With almost no traction in thin air, he stops—then plummets, a steel boulder bearing one wide-eyed Viking.

You know the sensation when you're not expecting a step down and your knee locks at the bottom, how the lightning bolt shoots up your spine to your skull—clank! It's that kind of landing. Jónsson arrives full force on the left-rear tire. A loud, embarrassing-sounding deflation follows . . . fooooooz.

But Jónsson leaps out like he's just won the lottery. The crowd of maybe 400 joyful Vikings (in Old Norse, it means "warrior") bays approval. Jónsson has failed—but he's failed magnificently. Gourds are lifted. Blood is spilled.

Next, Gunnar Gunnarsson launches the first Standard class upward. The two classes, Standard and Special, are intermixed like cocktail onions and raspberries—why not? At this point, nobody has a chance. But the more the course is chopped up by failure, the easier it gets. (The starting order is shuffled at each course, giving all a chance to fail grandly.)

Gunnarsson's 4x4 is a Jeep CJ-7 gone horribly wrong, a mutant with catastrophic genetic damage—too wide, too huge, too powerful . . . just too. But great things are expected—Gunnarsson leads the Standard-class championship. He motors up the first wall easily, its teeth blunted by the foregoing carnage, then makes a manful run at the second wall. But instead of getting air, he bogs down, begins digging straight in, feverishly, like a terrier at the beach.

Outta here.

The proud owner of today's longest name, sheep farmer Daníel Gunnar Ingimundarson, has the look of a man seeking headlines. Energetic, bold, solid as granite, with short red hair and a head large enough to house major ambitions, he blasts up walls one and two with contempt. First to reach the last wall, he gives it full blat, excess power slathering out. The green 4x4 leaps straight up, gaining altitude nicely three lengths above the wall. But instead of Jónsson's straight-ahead moonshot, at the apogee he suddenly—you could say, masterfully—noses over. In a tight inside loop, pike position, he lands on his hat—booomp! Perfect face plant, wheels spinning. Degree of difficulty, 6.3. Tens across the board, all judges smirking.

He bounds out, fists in the air. Roaring ovation. It is a splendid failure, the blood crushed out of him—the Viking way.

Popular support winds down to a few scattered fistfights. The last course, littered with the craters of failure, is now an easy causeway to the top. The remaining contenders motor upward, getting high scores for a full climb—but no glory. Yes, yes, it is unfair that early runners have no chance. But as any Viking will tell you, life is not fair. The point is to attack again and again, in human waves, until one of your guys gets through. This is war, Jack.

Understand, we have no reason to make this up. The world is well supplied with foolishness; no need to invent random violence to amuse you while you're eating your Cap'n Crunch. We admit that nothing in what we have described furnishes a good example for children. And we concur that this is definitely not politically correct. To wit, Formula Off-Road has not one female driver, Icelandic women having more constructive things to do. (Come to that, so do serial killers.)

But Formula Off-Road is symptomatic; Icelanders like doing things the Icelandic way. They opened the world's first public hydrogen filling station in the spring of 2003, although no public or private vehicle existed that could fill up—making them greener than a Sierra Club leprechaun. (By now, two hydrogen-powered city buses are running a normal schedule in Reykjavík.) At the same time, Iceland announced it would permit the hunting of whales, 188 this year (of an estimated 102,600) "for scientific purposes." The globe bellowed in protest. They're doing it anyway. In fact, a fine little Reykjavík restaurant, Thrir Frakkar ("Three Frenchmen"), serves whale meat. To any "concerned" citizen, of course, only a shameless boor would eat whale—it's like flame-broiled Bambi. I can report it is excellent, tasting like a lemony veal scaloppine.

Iceland is full of surprises. Moderated by the last gasp of the Gulf Stream, the climate is anything but icy most of the year. (The old saw goes: Iceland is green, Greenland is ice.) And if you like Nordic goddesses, they're as common as housecats. But being far, far north, December daylight shrinks to about four hours. Iceland's solution? Twelve hours' sleep, with a 24-hour slivovitz drip.

Yet if further proof is needed that the human spirit eventually tires of anything, a land of gorgeous women and 20-hour nights is not enough. A while back, Icelandic car guys asked themselves, "When the sun comes back, what can I do that is truly unwell?" Answer: Formula Off-Road.

And their nitrous-gulping 4x4s really don't know their place. Some events include a river crossing—and we don't mean tippy-toeing through five inches of damp, we mean deep river. Their 20-inch-wide, crinkle-wall drag-racing slicks, four-inch paddles vulcanized to the treads—driven by hundreds too many horsepower—simply blast their way across the surface like one of those go-like-hell Asian lizards jogging upriver to Rangoon.

But if you lose power at midstream?

You sink! Whaddaya think?

The long winter nights also allow time to devise the most bastardly combinations of 4x4 components. If you're any good, your engine, transfer case, front and rear diffs, axles, and brakes are all made by different manufacturers. Violating this many corporate sensibilities in one truck is a high art.

Take Ragnar Róbertsson. Born on a Friday the 13th some 39 years ago, this easygoing Icelander is, appropriately, an auto wrecker by trade. He's also the 2001 Icelandic champion and three-time Formula Off-Road World Cup Champion. ("There isn't really much 'world' in World Cup," he says, "so I just say Cup champion.") His Standard-class 4x4 looks very Jeep CJ-7—but don't look closely.

"We make them look like Jeeps on purpose," explains Thorsten Gunnarsson of the Toshiba team, one of Róbertsson's competitors. "At the start, Jeeps were all we ran, so now we keep that look. It's classic."

But surely to Jeep's horror, Róbertsson's Jeeplike truck didn't even start with a Jeep frame. Using the frame from an International Scout, he fitted a CJ-7 front end, a CJ-7 replica fiberglass body, and handmade aluminum doors, but his Pizza 67 Willys, sponsored by a pizza house (surprise!), uses the rear suspension from a Ford Econoline, the transfer case is a Dana 20 from a '74 Bronco, and Dana 60 axles are used front and rear. The massive steering loads of the fat paddle tires are levered around by the steering system of a forklift. Róbertsson uses a shifter gate out of a Mercedes-Benz 190 (do we hear teeth grinding in Stuttgart?), modified to allow bang shifts straight from low to reverse. Whyzzat? "If I'm starting to go over backward, I grab reverse. That usually stops it." He grins. "I don't like making repairs." He uses a 4.88 final-drive ratio in back and a 4.56 in front. Why? "When one end has grip, the other usually doesn't."

Oh, dear.

Yet Róbertsson's drivetrain is downright tame compared with many others. His Chevy 350 makes a modest 300 horsepower, 400 with nitrous added. He uses standard aluminum heads and rods, with forged pistons (to survive the nitrous), coupled to a Chevy 350 turbo Hydra-Matic. The rules place no limit whatever on horsepower, engine size, or configuration—it's the off-road Can-Am. But whereas this mad spectacle implies life is cheap in Vikingland, parts are dear and Róbertsson's 4x4 is wallet-limited. (He would like you to sponsor him—starting right now.)

The Special class isn't fundamentally much different from Róbertsson's Standard. Specials can use tires with deeper-digging staggered paddles, an improvement on the Standard's straight-across paddles, and nominally, Specials look less like production vehicles. Gradually, Specials are creeping away from stock hardware toward pricey custom components. Some Specials are said to be worth more than 100 large. The V-6 Musso and the Örninn/Besta have beautiful custom front axles, axle tubes, knuckles, hub carriers, and even differentials. Development is expensive and ongoing; after Stapafell, the Besta crew will reshape its front hub carriers for more acute steering angles. That's no small item when you're sideways on an 80-foot cliff, turning uphill, with only rubber paddles keeping you from pitch-poling into the chowder.

Several Specials had custom-built space frames, and given their massive power, ultra-heavy-duty suspensions are used—the Toshiba Patrol's air suspension was taken off a Peterbilt. With 950 horses, its modified Chevy automatic doesn't lock up until 5000 rpm. A super-tough 14-bolt, semi-floating Chevy rear end is used, and in front, a Ford center section is mated with Chevy axles and stopped by Lancia—Lancia!—cross-drilled disc brakes.

Teeth are grinding in Dearborn, Warren, Stuttgart, and—this just in—Turin.

At Stapafell, whenever gravity, poor traction, or sheer horror brings a competitor to a halt on the hill, a huge, ungainly front-loader, its scoop packed with black grit for ballast, lumbers in like a kindly elephant to yank, shove, flip, or otherwise drag the fallen soul back to his senses. The front-loader is needed this day only 8 or 10 times—not bad. Axles are blown and tires explode, all repaired quickly. Otherwise, there is little fevered wrenching. Icelandic 4x4s, like their drivers, are a stoic lot. If a right-front shock arm gets bent, as happened to Ingimundarson's 4x4 on the third course, but there isn't time to fix it until after the fourth course, you run the fourth course as is. No whining. Deal with it.

The tracks are laid out around the base of the mountain, each track marked by tires dug into the dirt, a white tire at the left limit, a red tire at the right. If executing a sudden downward swoop off a radically inclined ridge is the filthiest idea you can devise, that's where the course goes. Points are deducted for hitting a tire. More points are deducted for passing a wheel outside a tire. Still more points are deducted for passing all four wheels outside. (It happens regularly.) You're also scored on how far up you get, because everyone bogs down at least once. If you back up more than one vehicle length digging out, you're flagged to the next course. Period.

If Formula Off-Road makes one point, it is that you may be very good, but nobody is perfect. On the brutal eighth course, neither of the class leaders, Haraldur Pétursson's Special Musso or Gunnar Gunnarsson's Standard TrúUurinn, made a full run—their starting numbers were just too early—yet there was no McEnroe-style sniveling at the net. Life is unfair. And when those final three unclimbable walls were worn down, Ragnar Róbertsson's lightly powered Pizza 67 Willys motored straight up with insouciant ease. Making black roostertails, the Specials of Björn Ingi Jóhannsson and Kristján Jóhannesson also made full runs, the latter's unpainted-aluminum 4x4 looking like a Lotus Super 7 from Hell.

Entrants ante up 5000 krónur (about $62.50) to compete. There are no cash prizes, just short trophies and tall grins. Haraldur Pétursson's and Gunnar Gunnarsson's consistency earned them wins in Special and Standard, with Kristján Jóhannesson and Ragnar Róbertsson runners-up. The event started at precisely 1 o'clock and ran like a German train schedule, everyone having the Viking good time of their lives.

If you want 950-hp dirt action, click on www.4x4.is and www.4x4iceland.com. And if you must experience this in the flesh, go to www.icelandtouristboard.com, then fly to this fascinating volcanic barnacle on the spine of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Oh, and bring money. Iceland is not cheap, but it's worth every single crazed króna.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFFREY G. RUSSELL