Laplanders are good at three things: eating reindeer, drinking vodka and driving. The people of Northern Finland have other skills, too, but these you notice quickly.
In Kittila, a town 100 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, a new flavour of Stoli vodka arrived three weeks ago. Salted-caramel: it’s already a hit, the chef/waitress says while pouring shots. It tastes like candy, like soda concentrate, wickedly strong. This, she serves after dinner. Before dinner, it was vodka with a dash of bitter berry juice. It burns as it goes down. Staying warm is important in a place where the temperature can drop to -40 C for days on end.
The chef/waitress of this log-cabin restaurant cooks strips of reindeer over a fire pit in the middle of the room. The meat tastes slippery, gamey, with a hint of Rudolph.
Kittila is the start line for our 300-kilometre drive across the Arctic Circle, south to Kemi, at the northern end of the Gulf of Bothnia. The vehicles are Porsche. Pre-millennium this wouldn’t have been possible; Porsche was a sports car company then.
But, since 2002, when the first Cayenne rolled off the production line, Porsche has turned itself into an SUV company, a profit-making machine giving people exactly what they want. To date, it has built nearly one million SUVs and sales keep rising.
The next morning, it’s raining in Kittila. It shouldn’t be raining here in December. It’s unseasonably warm. Watching a row of high-powered SUVs idling in the too-warm far-north, one can’t help but think about climate change and feel guilty. Porsche would be quick to point out that the Cayenne is available as a plug-in hybrid and the Macan is offered with a tiny four-cylinder engine. But still.
The rain turns to ice as soon as it hits anything, making the roads a skating rink. Our bright-red Cayenne Turbo has about 300 more horsepower – 520 total – than is useful in these conditions. Nevertheless, it’s docile, tracking straight and true because of all-wheel drive and a set of serious cold-weather Michelin Alpin tires. It’s 9 a.m. and the sun’s not up yet.
You’d expect carnage in such treacherous conditions: cars scattered in the ditch like it was a wrecking yard, a car-pocalypse. But this is Lapland. Most of the year, drivers are in the dark, on snow and ice.
It’s obvious why Finland has spawned many of the world’s greatest drivers. It’s a small country – 5.5 million people – but it has born more World Rally champions than anywhere else: Marcus Gronholm, Tommi Makinen, Juha Kankkunen, Timo Salonen, Hannu Mikkola, Ari Vatanen and Markku Alen. Finland also spawned three Formula One World Champions: Keke Rosberg, Mika Hakkinen and Kimi Raikkonen – and that’s not counting 2016 champ Nico Rosberg, who is of Finnish descent.
Jukka Honkabuori learned to drive on ice when he was 12. The legal driving age in Finland is 18. “We went to the ice tracks to have some fun,” he says. It wasn’t exactly legal, but common enough the police didn’t mind. As a child, he learned to slide and drift a car, like so many other Laplanders. It’s wasn’t just fun. Controlling a sliding car on ice is a skill you need to survive in this part of the world.
The ice-tracks in Lapland, Honkabuori explains, are free, public car playgrounds. “They build them to avoid young people doing silly things on the road.” Kids are going to learn to slide and drift their cars. Better they don’t do it on the road.
The driving test in Finland is hard, too. “It’s a funny process,” he says. “You have to do a simulator test. You have to drive in the darkness. You also have to drive on slippery conditions. Suddenly, it starts snowing. There is even a reindeer crossing the road and you have to avoid hitting it. It’s like a video game.” If you hit the reindeer it’s game over, you fail.
Honkabuori is a racer and driving instructor with Porsche, travelling to its events all over the world. Today he’s working in his home town, at a Porsche ice-driving school in Rovaniemi. It’s the provincial capital of Lapland, just south of the Arctic Circle.
And no, there was no line in the road to let us know we’d crossed the Arctic Circle. No sign or totem to commemorate this imaginary line. We just crossed it. The Arctic is unsentimental like that. I did see a person riding a bicycle down the road, and later a herd of reindeer. It’s estimated there are about as many reindeer as there are people in Lapland.
On Porsche’s ice-track, the Cayenne is lithe for a big machine but it’s no great dance partner. There’s so much mass swinging like a pendulum from side to side, it’s easy to spin out. The smaller Macan is better. But jab the throttle for a millisecond too long, and it’ll pirouette hopelessly. Get the rhythm of turning and throttle wrong, and it’ll under-steer into a snowbank. But link up a couple good drifts, looking out the side windows to see where you’re going, and you get it. It’s pure, innocent fun. It’s a roller-coaster and you’re driving. Just one more run, you tell yourself again and again, because perfection seems possible, just out of reach. But, by 2 p.m., the sun has officially set.
From Rovaniemi, it’s 120 kilometres to Kemi, where the Gulf of Bothnia, off the Baltic Sea, separates Finland and Sweden. The last pink-orange burst of light is fading from the clouds. The fluffy snow-covered landscape looks crisp in the chrome light.
I’m not convinced public ice-tracks stop kids from drifting cars on the road. Porsche’s track only encouraged me. I slid the Macan Turbo – now with an $11,800 performance package – around every corner I could.
The Macan was already the best-handling SUV on the market, so the performance pack seems unnecessary. It brings the price up to $98,000, for a compact SUV, which is unconscionable. But Porsche is good at giving the people what they want, which, as it turns out, is crazy-fast SUVs with a famous badge. Some 2,000 people pay to attend Porsche’s ice-driving school in Lapland every year. This is a company that has its customers figured out.
But you don’t need a Porsche to learn to be a better driver.
“We drove whatever we could find,” Honkabuori says of his well-spent youth. “Some friends bought a car that was like 100 Euros.” By the time your average Laplander turns 18, before they even have a driver’s licence, they can probably drift circles around most of us.
“I think motorsport is a national sport. Ice hockey is, of course, even bigger, but Finland is known as a motorsport country,” Honkabuori says.
He imparted three lessons of winter-driving wisdom:
1. Don’t overestimate the grip. Just looking at the road doesn’t tell you anything. Feel it out slowly.
2. Check the braking distance. In a safe spot, brake hard to see how long it takes.
3. Drifting is hard and requires lots of practice. Don’t expect to learn it in one trip to the ice track.
By 4 p.m., it’s dark again. The temperature drops to -8 C, still unseasonably warm. But at least we’re driving on snow, not ice now.
In Kemi, we’re greeted with warm spiced cider. With vodka. Or, rather, vodka with a dash of cider. “Take your shoes off,” says our host, offering up colourful wool socks to wear to dinner. “Finland is so cold you need to be cozy.”
Later, there’s pink vodka in a glass made of ice, which melts rapidly, forcing you to down the foul liquid quickly.
The reindeer and the vodka, I’m not so sure about. But Finland could teach the world how to drive.
The writer was a guest of the auto maker. Content was not subject to approval.