Glancing around is no good. You have to peer, stare and generally gaze to pick out any landmarks. All around is a soft, hazy white, upset only occasionally by the odd blue streak or grey-green line of snow-dusted trees.
The white-out is all-pervading and details, even with all the peering, seem fuzzy and indistinct. The snow that lies on everything absorbs sound, killing echoes and dampening sound waves to the point that you feel that if you screamed, the guy standing next to you wouldn’t hear it. Everything looks like it’s been taken from the front of a Christmas card, but it’s a bleak, wasteland Christmas card. A post-apocalyptic SantaLand.
Ivalo is a town in the far north of Finland, about 100km north of the Arctic circle and in uncomfortably close proximity to the former Soviet nuclear submarine base at Murmansk. Sixty years ago, frozen and U-Boat-fearing transatlantic convoy vessels would make the long and perilous trek to Murmansk to feed the Red Army’s insatiable appetite for guns, trucks, tanks and ammunition as it ground on its bone-crushing drive to Berlin. More recently, the sinister black shapes of Victor and Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarines would slip noiselessly down the fjord just to the east of Ivalo, heading out to wait, silently, for the call to unleash nuclear annihilation. More recently, those self same black organs of mass murder have been rusting uselessly at their Murmansk quaysides, leading one to ask worrying questions. Such as how much Hammerite can the Russian navy afford to paint on them before the cracks start to get too big? And is that greenish glow on the horizon Aurora Borealis or a reactor core about to go critical?
But the kind of sinister, lingering death concerns (from either freezing cold or uranium) that would put off most tourists is exactly what draws car companies to cheerful spots like Ivalo. Wide open spaces, most of them lakes that freeze over during the long, northern winter are bountiful. The ice can reach thicknesses exceeding three metres, which means that, once cleared of snow, they can be used as the smoothest, clearest test tracks you’ve ever seen. Car companies love these places. All the room to play they could ask for, few local residents to bother and the kind of unpleasant climactic conditions that will keep all but the hardiest and most determined spy photographer indoors. In other words, the perfect place to test, stretch and develop new cars and their peripheral systems to way beyond their expected limits of endurance.
My foot is all but flat to the floor, lifting occasionally to try and balance the weight transfer from front to rear. My hands are sawing comically at the wheel, as if trapped in a cheesy sixties back-projection car chase special effect. The 2.3-litre 215bhp turbocharged five-cylinder engine is screaming to within an micron of its red-line. Outside, the studded, rally-style tyres are slipping and biting, desperately trying to balance the demands of the power I’m asking for with the available grip, of which there is, effectively, none. The studs are chewing up the ice and peppering the side windows with a fine coating of chips as the car struggles to perform the perfect parabolic arc that its dim-witted driver is attempting to scribe. Does anyone want to bet that I’m in a Volvo?
Ten years ago, you’d never have believed it, but now, thanks to a descending line of C70 coupé, tearaway 850 T5 and V70 R estates, successful assaults on the British and European Touring Car championships and the arrival of the gorgeous S60 saloon, Volvo has achieved that which no other manufacturer has truly managed; a cocktail of safety and sex appeal.
Which is precisely why I’m at Volvo’s ice-bound test track (test rink?) just outside Ivalo. It’s not only an opportunity to have a first drive of the XC90 V8 and the AWD T5 version of the V50 estate, it’s also a perfect excuse to punish Volvos DSTC stability control system until it squeaks and begs for mercy.
Of course, the true trick to testing such a clever electronic system is to first sample the car’s responses with it switched off, hence the sideways tomfoolery on a polished ice skidpan. Fun it most certainly was (like all your Colin McRae Rally dreams come true in an orgy of flailing tyre studs and, I suspect, bent valve stems from over-revving the engine...) but it was also educative. Volvo has learned much in the past few years about the black and mysterious art of chassis tuning, and with the V50 being based on the same component set as the beautifully-handling new Ford Focus, the art has been drawn closer to perfection than ever. Even on a surface that’s difficult to stand upright on, and harder still to fall over on with any sense of grace, the V50 performed faultlessly. With the DSTC switched off, its responses were pure, proportional and steady. OK, so it had the benefit of those grippy, studded tyres, but even taking that into account, the V50 proved itself to be a true drivers’ car. Although you could easily accuse the steering of being too artificial in its feel, there’s no doubting the way the chassis responds to steering and throttle input. It trimmed its line when requested, pushed gently wide of the endless skidpan apex when throttle was applied and only spun out when the slip angle got beyond your correspondent’s ability to reset to the straight ahead. Sorry, but Jackie Stewart I ain’t.
Thankfully, under the bonnet is a little electronic box that does a fine impression of the canny wee three time world champ. Volvo calls it DSTC, but we all know it more generically as stability control.
Of course, the most extreme test that a stability control system can be put through is violent swerving followed by sudden braking on a slick surface. Which is why Volvo brought along a lot of cones. Now I know you and I will never likely work up the guts to start weaving in and out of the traffic cones at our nearest road works, however much fun it might sound, but any time a car company brings a bunch of journalists to a test track, the cones are always out and the word ‘slalom’ is never far from someone’s lips.
And despite the shiny surface of the frozen lake offering about as much grip as a margarine covered Tefal, the V50 still slipped between the cones with grace and aplomb. True, eventually even the clever DSTC system will run out of ideas and a few cones were missed or trampled, but even the most violent on-road emergencies usually only involve a few seconds of swerving, so the system has plenty in the bank, really.
More impressive again was the braking test. On the same stretch of polished ice, two sets of cones were placed about 800-metres apart. Line the car up at the first set and hit the accelerator as hard as you can. The studs bite as best they can and the little yellow DSTC warning light starts flashing faster than Jordan at a paparazzi convention as all 215bhp gets shunted through to the tyres. Even with the electronics parceling out the torque, and even cutting back on the throttle, the V50 still reaches about 120kmh by the second set of cones, the braking mark. Now for the good bit; remove hands from steering wheel and stand on the brake pedal with all your might. Your body tenses, the pressure on the middle pedal signalling your brain that a crash stop is about to occur. But it doesn’t. The ice doesn’t have enough grip to stop you quickly, so instead of headbutting the windscreen, you sail majestically on, losing speed gradually as the anti-lock brakes pulse rhythmically away. But despite the fact that you’re offering the steering no instructions whatsoever, the electronics are keeping the V50 on a perfect straight-ahead track. By rights, the car should have snapped into a spin and we should be neatly embedded in one of the two snowbanks that border this stretch. But no. The little Volvo doggedly holds its course until it has come to a safe and complete stop. And then the driver gets out, slips on the grip-free surface and falls over again. Do they make DSTC for boots?
Doing the same tests in the new XC90 V8 was also instructional. Designed originally only for the American market, but coming in right-hand-drive before the end of the year, the new 4.4-litre 311bhp engine is not related to the Jaguar-derived unit now serving duty in the Range Rover, Discovery and Range Rover Sport, despite which, the two units share the same cubic capacity. No, the Volvo unit is an in-house design (apparently with quite a bit of help from distant Ford Motor Company relative Yamaha, who also helped with the design of the Fiesta’s terrific little 1.25 unit that we’ve been raving about for nearly ten years now) that has been specifically created to fit in the tight confines of the XC90’s engine bay. Because the XC was designed around two long, narrow engines (the turbocharged 272bhp straight-six and the 163bhp diesel five cylinder), squeezing in a V8 was not going to be the work of a moment, especially with Volvo’s insistence that the XC90’s clever and effective front crumple zones were sacrosanct.
So the unit is astonishingly compact for a four-and-a-bit-litre engine. Overlapping cylinder bores and a clever approach to the layout of ancillaries like the alternator and fuel pump mean that it slots in neatly, if tightly, where only in-line engines have previously ventured. And it’s a fab engine, with a flood of easy going torque (440Nm) and a meaty V8 grumble that shifts up an octave to a proper scream at high rpm.
And while the XC90 doesn’t quite deport itself as well as the smaller, more nimble V50 on the ice tests (pulls to one side slightly when doing the braking tests with hands off the steering wheel, won’t drift neatly on the skidpan) it’s still mightily impressive for a big 4x4. Fun too. At the end of the braking test, there’s a wide stretch of empty, cone-free ice. Switch off the DSTC, crank on full lock and let the torque out to play. Bet you didn’t know that an XC90 can spin in its own length...
Later, out on the road and we’ve come to a halt at the long fence and tall gate that marks Finland’s border with Russia. I know that the Soviet experiment is long dead and that Russia is now a tourist-friendly (ish) place but it’s still impossible to stifle a shiver of foreboding. All around are tall pine trees and beyond them, the endless whiteness. Who knows how many have perished trying to force or sneak their way across this arbitrary line in the snow?
Clamber back into the cosy comfort of the XC90. Cars these days just seem to shrug off nature so effortlessly. It’s good to peer into the whiteness occasionally, just to remind yourself just what an impressive achievement that is.
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