Ice driving with Porsche
AN INVITATION TO JOIN PORSCHE’S ICE-DRIVING EXPERIENCE IN INNER MONGOLIA IS NO TIME FOR COLD FEET, DISCOVERS
We’re more than a thousand kilometres north of Beijing, close to China’s borders with Russian Siberia and Mongolia, in a vast area of prairie known as the Hulunbuir grasslands. For much of the year it’s cold up here: average temperatures dip below zero in late October and won’t return to positive numbers until May, so when I step off my flight at Hailar airport late in the evening in early March, it’s freezing.
That, however, is all for the good, because I’ve travelled all the way up here to spend a couple of days boning up my ice-driving skills in Porsche China’s Snowforce customer programme. Just as car and tyre companies do in other cold corners of the world, such as Arctic Sweden and Finland, the German manufacturer has leased a couple of small lakes outside Yakeshi ( a city of almost 400,000 people whose existence I’ve been totally unaware of until now) in Inner Mongolia, two tracts of water that should remain reliably frozen until at least the end of April. It’s on these
icy surfaces that I – along with around 60 other participants, most from mainland China but a handful from Hong Kong – will be slipping and sliding around in a variety of cars from the Porsche range: mid-engine 718 Boxsters and Caymans, and rear-engine 911 Carreras, but also a few allwheel-drive Cayenne SUVs and even a large Panamera saloon thrown in for comparison.
Dawn arrives the next morning, predictably frigid but bright and sunny, which is typical of winters here, and after a hurried breakfast we file out to board the buses that take us to the lake. As we’re driving out of town through woods of slender larch trees, the sunlight shafting diagonally down through the trunks and branches, I notice there’s surprisingly little snow around and for a moment have alarming notions of my Porsche, with me in it, disappearing through a hole in the ice into the chilly depths beneath. But when we round a bend in the road and catch sight of the lakes it’s clear I need have no such worries: a sturdy and unbroken sheet of white covers the surface of each one, with networks of tracks – short straights, long curves, tight bends and hairpins – ploughed out from the snow on both.
We file off the buses, past the red-clad instructors lined up to greet us, and into the “tent” that Porsche has erected beside the lakes. Glass-walled on three sides, wood-floored,
warm and exceedingly spacious, this two-storey structure is our daytime base for today and tomorrow – it fact, it’s so civilised and comfortable that I could happily move in permanently. It’s here that we eat and relax when not out on the ice, and where we’re also given our pre-drive briefings each day; the latter are exclusively in Mandarin, which I don’t speak, but fortunately an affable Singaporean instructor named CK takes me off into a corner and, with the help of a laptop presentation, delivers the whole spiel to me, one-on-one, in English.
The Hong Kong contingent is paired off for the duration, two students per car and five cars to a group; my partner turns out to be a Taiwan-born engineer named Tony, whose collection of wheels back home in Hong Kong includes a Ferrari F12 (though he tells me he’s seriously contemplating a 911 GT3 RS). We strap ourselves in, check the intercom’s working and then, with traction control engaged, motor slowly out on to the ice in our convoys of Carreras for the first of the day’s exercises.
Our instructors work us hard, car after car after car, and with a driver change after every three or four attempts at each exercise. We begin with a couple of short slalom courses, traction control now fully turned off and with drive mode set to Track, where we learn how the Carrera’s rearmounted engine results in a propensity to oversteer (in other words, to turn in far more sharply than intended), and how to counteract that by counter-steering (in other words, with the wheel held roughly at half a turn the opposite direction) while applying judicious dollops of
WE LEARN HOW THE CARRERA’S REAR-MOUNTED ENGINE RESULTS IN A PROPENSITY TO OVERSTEER
power. CK shows us how it’s done and it’s not only mightily impressive but also makes perfect sense. Once we’re behind the wheel, however, it all seems so counterintuitive and our responses so uncoordinated that our efforts appear hopeless in comparison.
We move on to a figure-eight and then a wide circle of ice, around which we slide, first by swinging out the Carrera’s heavy tail and then catching it by counter-steering and holding the car in an extended drift with the revs at around 3,000 (or that, at least, is the general idea). Thus – and for some reason this seems to work more easily for me than the first pair of exercises – I’m careening round and round anticlockwise while steering to the right. We’re getting slightly better, our instructors’ major gripes being that we’re doing too much of everything: too much power and way too much steering. And that’s it for the morning session.
We switch to the mid-engine 718 after lunch – ours is a soft-top Boxster, whose roof we’re ordered to keep firmly raised (though in these temperatures that’s no hardship at all) – and whose relatively neutral handling, thanks to the concentration of mass in the car’s centre, is in marked contrast to the tail-happy Carrera’s. More exercises and more repetition – it’s the only way – and though I can observe little discernible improvement in my own skills, when we’re finally let loose on our first proper stretch of track I can at least get round it without embedding the car’s nose in a drift of snow.
In fact, over the course of two days there’s no real “Eureka!” moment, because on the rare occasion when I do get it right, falsely emboldened I go out again and get it all wrong. Nonetheless, across the entire group there’s a growing sense of confidence, so that by lunchtime on Day Two, after a second morning in which we’ve alternated between 911s and 718s, our instructors are hectoring less and even handing out the occasional plaudit. We’re sent out on to the longest and trickiest course of all, a threekilometre serpentine of ice and snow containing a seemingly
endless curve that we’re supposed to negotiate sideways, from start to finish. Granted, the 718 and I aren’t exactly dancing together like Fred and Ginger, but after three relatively smooth laps in quick succession, nor do we trip over each other’s feet either. Result!
Just as it should do, the programme ends with some lighthearted fun. We still haven’t driven the Cayenne, so as a kind of finale we motor out to the far side of the lakes and a course we’d never seen till now. We’d assumed Porsche’s high and heavy SUV would be more than a handful – but how wrong we were. In no time at all we’re cavorting joyously on the slippery surface like a small colony of elephant seals, the cars looking bizarre and ungainly on the ice, yet in spite of their bulk proving easily, safely and even gracefully controllable – and hugely, laughably enjoyable into the bargain.
Indeed, the big 4x4’s unexpected ice-driving abilities come as a revelation to all of us – so that when we’re headed back to the airport I ask the Hong Kong contingent to name the high point of the Snowforce programme, the answer is unequivocal. “The Cayenne,” says everyone without hesitation. “Definitely the Cayenne.”
THE 718’S NEUTRAL HANDLING IS IN MARKED CONTRAST TO THE TAIL-HAPPY CARRERA’S