MX-5 IN ICELAND
With deserted roads and scenery to die for, should Iceland be on everyone’s list of must‑do driving destinations? evo charts a lap of the Nordic nation to find out
Chilly Nordic adventure in a Miata
IT TAKES A LOCAL TO SNAP ME OUT OF MY blissful ignorance. Partly because the thrashing of a Nissan Patrol’s 44-inch tyres is difficult to ignore when it’s occurring at eye level, but mostly for the look its occupants give as they pass. Incredulity would cover it, but pity is an appropriate surrogate. Either way, the drawnout passing manoeuvre and perplexed looks are enough to remind me that what I’m doing isn’t, by Icelandic standards, normal.
Driving certain cars endows one with something approximating celebrity. The Nissan GT-R, even after all these years, still has the presence to make people stop, stare and whip out a cameraphone. Italian supercars do too, and while you can slide by crowds unnoticed in a Porsche 911, doing the same thing without attracting admiring glances in a Mercedes-AMG GT or a BMW i8 is nigh on impossible.
The Mazda MX-5 doesn’t quite pull off this feat in the UK, but in Iceland, with the roof down, you’d struggle to draw more attention if you were Björk. Mazda’s roadster is not a familiar car on the Nordic island: Reykjavík’s lone Mazda dealer has sold just two. Not two this month, or this year – two in total. From worldwide sales of over a million since 1989. Given the city receives around 40 more rainy days than London every year and 400 hours’ less sunshine (and it’s among the milder areas on the island), this is perhaps not surprising. As I stroll around the world’s northernmost capital on a crisp evening, I spot a bright yellow third-generation Toyota MR2 parked outside an apartment block, and briefly wonder whether I’ve stumbled across the residence of the village idiot.
Keen to discover more villages that might be missing theirs, I set off to the north on the first leg of a journey that few will ever attempt
ROUTE 1 SKIMS A NARROW PATH BETWEEN THE ATLANTIC AND TONGUE-LIKE GLACIERS
in a small Japanese convertible: Iceland’s Route 1 ‘Hringvegur’ ringroad. The highway, equivalent to a British A-road in most places and still surfaced with gravel in a couple of sections, winds its way around the entire country over the course of 1332 kilometres. It cuts through mountains and volcanic regions, hugs fjords and rocky outcrops, and skims a narrow path between the Atlantic coastline and the tonguelike glaciers that rasp their way down from the island’s highlands before calving off great chunks of ancient ice at the coast.
Leaving the cosy confines of Reykjavík’s Hotel Borg and instantly dropping the roof isn’t quite as uncomfortable as I’d expected. It’s midSeptember and surprisingly mild, and while Atlantic gusts swirl their way around the cabin, the sun is putting up a good fight, highlighting patches of the green, mountainous terrain that surrounds the city.
The MX-5 is not a fast car – certainly not in 1.5-litre guise, as here. On paper it only loses a second to the 2-litre model to 100kmph (8.3sec versus 7.3), but from the moment I pull out into traffic in Reykjavík, the half-litre deficit is immediately apparent. As the road starts to climb and twist, it’s clear you need to work the four-cylinder unit hard, though like the larger motor there’s an inertia-free feeling to the way it responds to throttle inputs and a sense of mechanical integrity about it that melts any fears you may have about spending long periods in the higher reaches of the rev range.
‘When I itch, I must scratch,’ the Icelandic say. It’s equivalent to our more familiar ‘if the shoe fits…’, and it’s somewhat relevant here because in Iceland the 1.5’s outright lack of pace isn’t frustrating so much as appropriate. The national speed limit is just 90kmph (56mph) and drops to 80kmph (50mph) on gravel. Exceeding
these limits by more than a few kmph brings with it an instant fine equivalent to around `6000, and this rapidly rises into hundreds and even thousands of rupees as the speed increases. There’s no getout-of-jail-free card for tourists, either. Which is unfortunate, as big speeds can land you in a cell until the justice system can find a judge to preside over your case. 129bhp? Er, that should be fine, thanks.
Anyway, one of the great joys of convertible driving is being able to supplant actual speed with the sensations of it, and the latest MX-5 nails the required balance. It lets enough of a breeze into the cockpit to let you know you’re motoring along, but even as the temperature drops it remains refined enough to make roof-down its default state. Like the engine, the car’s heating system feels faintly over-engineered; the temperature knob is never twirled into its final third and I daren’t venture beyond one illuminated segment on the heated seats for fear of being rendered infertile. I’ve brought a hat and gloves along but for most of the trip they will go unused, as the former gently cooks my head and the latter’s woollen construction is not conducive to gripping the leather-rimmed steering wheel.
The further I stray from Reykjavík, the less it seems like Iceland is inhabited at all. With everyone travelling at roughly the same pace on the gently flowing roads, it’s rare to encounter any cars in your own lane, and oncoming traffic seems to comprise mainly gailycoloured camper vans or the near-ubiquitous rental Suzuki Vitaras full of starry-eyed tourists. The scenery is changing but I can’t shake the familiarity – verdant mountains redolent of those in the Scottish Highlands give way to views of the arid yet occasionally chilled landscapes between the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada.
Roughly halfway along the north coast and around 370 kilometres into the trip, America fades back into Scotland as the road descends into Akureyri, an important fishing port and the island’s secondlargest city. A tight schedule means a stop isn’t possible, but the brightly painted buildings provide a brief flash of colour in my peripheral vision before I cross the Eyjafjörður (‘Island fjord’), hang on to the Mazda’s lower gears, and climb back towards the centre of the island. There’s a rasp to the exhaust and blips of the floor-hinged throttle pedal are accompanied by a chuff of induction noise. Like with the original MX-5, you know it’s been cynically tuned to sound like a sports car of yore, but it feels so much more genuine than the piped-in noises you’ll find elsewhere and more satisfying as a result. The shift action itself is predictably slick, too, though the constant engineered-in vibration of the gearlever seems a rose-tint too far. The shifter in the first-generation MX-5 doesn’t shimmy in the same way but feels even oilier, more mechanical to slot.
The scenery wants for little, but so far Route 1 isn’t exactly taxing for a low-slung sports car. You feel the country’s topography leaves little figurative room for a road-builder’s creativity. Wide, flat valleys carved by glaciers draw simple paths between towns and villages. There’s little incentive to send a road winding up a mountainside and cascading down the opposite face, as those who laid spaghetti through the Alps or aforementioned Rockies seem to have done. The straights are long, the curves gentle. The surface is perfect, too, resilient to poor weather but untroubled by the hundreds, rather
than hundreds of thousands, of cars that pass over it each day. Where landscapes haven’t been carved by ice they’ve been formed by ancient lava flows, leaving vast, flat volcanic plains and Arctic tundra.
Lakes, too, and as Hringvegur curls around Mývatn (‘Lake of Midges’, whose winged inhabitants have mercifully disappeared by the autumn, leaving the roadster’s nose unspeckled) the road finally breaks into some tighter turns. It’s still possible to maintain the country’s speed limit but the corners encourage you to build some load through the MX-5’s chassis. In 1.5-litre form you get 16inch wheels (an inch smaller than those on the 2-litre), no limitedslip differential and no uprated Bilstein dampers. The combination makes the car even more prone to roll – wiggling the steering to and fro rocks the car around its roll axis like the springs are made from trifle – but where the more powerful model can feel disjointed and rides firmly despite ample body roll, the softer car seems a little more fluid.
Reykjahlíð lies to the north-east of Mývatn and marks the gateway to the eerie, active-volcanic landscape south of the Krafla Caldera (a huge geological cauldron). Plumes of steam rise from deep geothermal wells, whose sulphuric smell instantly pervades the Mazda’s cabin. Yellowstone Park, the similar prehistoric terrain of which I visited a few years ago, is where my thoughts land this time. A hardy few explore the thin trails that lead through bubbling pits of boiling mud. For the first time, there’s a tangible sense of the island’s churning geology in action. Krafla and a series of other volcanoes that cut through Iceland from its northern to its southern coast are the
THE FURTHER I STRAY FROM REYKJAVÍK, THE LESS IT SEEMS LIKE ICELAND IS INHABITED AT ALL
ever-present reminder that Iceland is being torn asunder, stretched between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates.
Few places I’ve ever visited match the isolation of Iceland’s northeastern plains. America’s deserts come closest, but the roads that slice through them are pockmarked by civilisation. In Iceland, you feel like the only living being for miles around. The roads often track arrow straight, with no obstacles to disrupt their path towards the horizon. At 90kmph, you get plenty of time alone with your thoughts. I mostly mull on whether the person who implemented that speed limit had ever left the confines of Reykjavík.
As night rolls in, and with around 644 kilometres covered, I reach Egilsstaðir, the country’s largest easterly town. Parking up, I finally pull up the roof. This, just like the process of stowing it, is the work of one arm. People have long claimed this possible of MX-5s but the current car is the first that doesn’t require you to have a ball-joint mid-spine to comfortably reach back from the driver’s seat.
LEAVING THE NEXT MORNING, FLASK FRESHLY brimmed with hotel coffee, I drop the canvas before even thumbing the starter button. At this time of year autumnal colours stain the few deciduous trees that cling on to life in the subpolar climate, and damp roads from an overnight shower add a different, whooshing timbre to the sound of tyres on tarmac.
It doesn’t last for long as just south of Egilsstaðir is the first section of gravel road. The surface is smooth at first, with a firm layer below a thin topping of loose chippings, but as the track climbs up into glacially formed ranges along the coast, the road becomes rougher and small steering corrections are required to keep the MX-5 on course. Low-lying cloud begins to obscure the views either side and I hug the hillside rather than straying too close to the inevitable, shrouded drop to the other side.
And then, as suddenly as the mist had rolled in, it disperses. Churning, sinister clouds hang above the valley, its earthen yellows and browns broken only by small patches of green farmland and the glistening snail-trail left by a river. And before it all, two perfect, gravel-strewn hairpins that strive to trim some height from the mountain road before it rollercoasters into the valley below. On regular all-season tyres the front wheels scud away at the loose surface and the steering refuses to filter back many messages, neither of which inspires confidence when local authorities have a laid-back attitude to Armco placement. With no limited-slip differential, slides are a little more scrappy than they might be with one installed, but after a day of sticking rigidly to speed limits, this one small section
PLUMES OF STEAM RISE FROM DEEP GEOTHERMAL WELLS, WHOSE SULPHURIC SMELL INSTANTLY PERVADES THE MAZDA’S CABIN
MINIMAL TRAFFIC AND SWEEPING TURNS HAVE MADE THE MX-5 A PERFECT MATCH
feels like it was designed with MX-5-driving tourists in mind.
As the road reaches the coast at Breiðdalsvík the tarmac returns, but a few miles further and it’s gone again. Of the entire route, just 32 kilometres remain unpaved, but the sense of adventure they lend to Route 1 – particularly in a small, open-topped two-seater – far outweighs that implied by the limited distance. They’re also the gateway to some of Hringvegur’s best driving roads, as it tightly grips the coastal topography in both direction and elevation.
The crests, swoops and compressions again bring to mind Scotland, and the occasional open stretch is enough to pass ambling tourists without troubling the speed limit. The MX-5 doesn’t feel quite as tied-down on undulating roads as a similarly priced hot hatch, but there’s balance that few of those can replicate with their front-biased weight distribution. The steering still irks – the response is there, the feedback isn’t – but it’s hard not to feel Mazda has met its brief to develop a car that more or less anyone can enjoy.
Southern Iceland is also home to its most iconic views. Here my data banks are empty – nothing I’ve ever seen compares to the massive Vatnajökull Glacier as its outlets churn their steady paths towards the North Atlantic. Hoffellsjökull appears first, a twisting river of ice sandwiched between two mountain ranges. Every few miles a new outlet appears, coinciding with a metal bridge that spans either side of the glacier’s outwash plain.
It’s still a surprise when Jökulsárlón appears, however. Iceland’s most famous glacial outlet, the lake is home to a changing field of electric-blue icebergs (the colour the result of a lack of lightrefracting bubbles of air), which separate from a glacier nearly a mile inland. It would be serene but for Jökulsárlón’s status as one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions, and after briefly setting foot in the inevitable gift shop I decide it’s high time for more isolation.
After 962 kilometres of roofless driving, Iceland finally shows its precipitatious side as an Atlantic squall rolls across the southern plains. After a few miles of kidding myself, I decide it’s becoming a little too fresh and finally raise the hood and cocoon myself in the Mazda’s compact cabin. Rain lashes against the windscreen and wind tries to push the car’s nose from its path, and I begin to appreciate how useable the modern MX-5 has become.
Beyond the town of Selfoss the Hringvegur starts to descend back into Reykjavík. The cloak of darkness highlights through street lights just how small the city is. Small, but after two days in almost total isolation, still a shock to the system as I join the back of a queue of traffic. The MX-5 has always been about preservation of momentum, keen responses and sheer brio making up for any deficiency in performance, and the last few days of minimal traffic and sweeping turns have made it a perfect match. If Mazda of Reykjavík hasn’t sold at least three MX-5s by now, I might have to return in my own MX-5 to convince them further. ⌧