Driving On Ice

You’d assume a frozen lake is no place to hone your rally technique: It’s -25°C, you’re dressed like a bear, and forget walking, it’s so slippery that standing is difficult. Driving around the big oval track on the lake is an exercise quite lacking in sanity. But that’s exactly what we’re doing as former European rally champion Jochi Kleint watches us from the outside, screaming instructions into his radio, tutoring us on car control: “Car number 8, give gas, give gas, now catch it, catch it!”

Welcome to Arjeplog, the winter testing capital of the world. Just short of the Arctic Circle, this town of 1500 inhabitants swells to 5000 during the winters, as testers and engineers from every major car company descend on it. Tata Motors’ new trucks are cold-weather-tested here; as will be Mahindra vehicles in the next season. ABS brakes were developed here in the 70s, traction control, ESP and other electronic safety systems are calibrated and prototypes hammer around the frozen lakes to hone dynamics. The place is swarming with test cars, and  spy photographers lurk behind every snow bank.
Which is the serious side of things. We, on the other hand, are going to have some fun and hone our driving skills, courtesy Audi’s winter driving experience program. We have are a brace of gleaming A4 Avants (estate) — studded winter tyres, full underbody protection lest we plough into a snow bank, quattro four-wheel-drive to make the most of whatever little traction is available — and a single-point agenda: mastering the Scandinavian flick.

If you’re even remotely interested in rallying you’ll have heard of the Scandinavian flick, the pendulum turn made popular by Finnish and Swedish drivers in the sixties and seventies, who used it to get their Volvos, Saabs and Minis turned into corners.

Belting down a forest stage at rally pace and simply tugging the steering wheel in the direction of the turn would send you flying off the cliff due to the immense momentum. You could slow the car down before the corner, but who wants to watch a slow rally driver? Enter the Scandinavian flick, a technique which at first looks like a colossal error in judgment but pulled correctly makes you faster, more spectacular and gets your pictures in the papers.

The technique in a nutshell? With the car in the middle of the road, brake and momentarily turn against the direction of the turn to get the tail swinging, then off the brakes to shift weight to the rear, fling the steering the other way, get the tail to pendulum around the front, and as the nose points towards the apex give it gas, a dab of corrective lock, more gas, and power out of the corner in a beautiful sideways drift.

Looks phenomenal from the outside; from behind the wheel you get a high that has to be illegal.
But first the basics. We start by driving round the oval in the 2.0-litre TFSI A4 Quattro. It’s the estate body style but dynamically it’s similar to the sedan we have in India (though we don’t get the 2.0-litre engine). Quattro is intrinsic to any high-performance Audi; after all the brand shot to prominence with the quattro rally cars that introduced four-wheel-drive to the world of rallying. Drivers like Stig Blomqvist, Hannu Mikola, Walter Röhrl, and the only driver whose sexiness equalled the machine, Michèle Mouton, made the WRC all their own. From past experience, I know that quattro provides terrific grip, much more than rear-wheel-drive, and the advantage gets amplified in wet. But I also know that it is next to impossible to get the tail sliding (if it is, you are heading off a cliff), and at the limit they tend to understeer much more than RWD cars.

Jochi Kleint is here to teach me to powerslide a quattro A4. He has impeccable credentials: European rally champion in ’79, a regular in the WRC till a few years back, podiums at events including the Monte Carlo, team-mate to Walter Röhrl in the Opel works team. Jochi, then, knows how to drive, and he’s in his element.

He’s also having a lot of fun; you can tell by the grin as he pulls a monster slide round the oval, looking out of the side window, one hand holding opposite lock, the other pointing out the direction of the turn, telling us what dynamic weight transfer can do to a car’s cornering ability.

Unless you’re a hardcore petrolhead I doubt you will have heard about how to use the weight of the car to turn it. The theory is simple: When you brake, the weight balance of the car shifts to the nose and thus there’s more grip at the front so it can find more purchase and turn better. At the same time the rear goes light and can become tail-happy depending on what you’re doing with the steering. This weight that shifts to the nose is the dynamic weight and, using brakes and throttle, the weight can be shifted to either improve front-end bite or to lighten the tail so it’s easier to make it slide out. In practice, it calls for aggression — get on and off the brakes hard to get the weight to move around — and on our first outing, big snow banks giving us the jitters, all we could do is be ultra smooth with steering and throttle.

That’s also because we have another lesson to master. Patience. The dynamics of a four-wheel-drive car are rather different from the cars we’re used to. In a front-driver, the moment the tail slides out we apply corrective lock to catch the slide; by its very nature you can’t powerslide or hold it in a long drift. In a Quattro you must unlearn all that and get comfortable with a car sliding underneath you, play with the grip, feel the balance of the car, understand what it is telling you. That’s the only way to master cornering on a slippery surface like ice, or even dirt.

Get to 60-odd kmph, off the gas, turn into the corner, wait for the tail to come around, resist the instinctive reaction to catch the slide, let the tail slide out, more, more (Jochi’s on the walkie screaming patience, patience, patience) and as the nose points to the apex give it gas, correct the slide and exit gracefully. It’s not that difficult; all it needs is seat-of-the-pants sensitivity, to judge how much the tail is sliding out by, and how much steering lock to apply. Over-correct and the tail snaps around the other way, too little and the car will spin.  It gives you great feel, sensitivity and precision, how to judge available grip and make the most of it.

It also debunks our earlier claims that Audis can’t be played around with. Sure, you need a slippery surface like a frozen lake so that it is easier to break traction. And like all modern cars the A4 is also set up to understeer at the limit otherwise there’ll be too many cars sliding backwards into the trees. But, with the right technique, showboating is possible. The slow-in-fast-out technique applies even more here, using dynamic weight transfer to unsettle the car and get the tail to play loose. Looking where you want to go is as important and, at times, with the car sliding, finding the next corner requires looking out the co-driver’s window.

Most important is braking; the ice accentuates every little mistake and with braking left too late the ABS judders helplessly and the car ploughs straight into the snow banks. And that makes Jochi mad.
“Brake, brake!” he hollers on the walkie. “You’re too fast, slow down, use the brakes!” Jochi hates understeer like I hate spinach. It makes his cars look helpless, steering on the lock stops sliding straight on. And it presses the tractor into service to pull his cars out of the snow bank. “That’s no way to drive. You can’t drive with understeer. You have to control the understeer. Kill it.”

 The tractor saw as much action as the cars; pulling out A4s stuckin snow banks

Slow in and fast out then. But not granny slow, otherwise the rear won’t slide and the car won’t have enough momentum for weight transfer. Getting the car to dance needs speed and commitment.

A break for lunch, time to let everything sink in, and then Jochi takes the training up a notch. On an alternative course on the oval he demonstrates the basics of the Scandinavian flick; how to use the brakes and minimal steering to get the tail swinging out the wrong way and then using the weight transfer and steering to get the tail to slide out and deal with the corner at a much faster pace. Today, the flick is part of every serious rally driver’s repertoire, making them both spectacular to watch and frighteningly fast.

Jochi demonstrates by taking us on a flying lap round a track created on the lake, first 2 km, then he opens a further 2 km and then the full 6 km circuit which accurately resembles a stage from the Swedish rally. At first what he does seems impossible; looking at the next corner through the side window, front bumper kicking little tufts of snow as he kisses the apex, steering on the lock stops, the tail always and completely sideways.

And we are supposed to do it.

Not a chance. On the first day the tractor sees as much action as the cars, pulling out cars buried in snow banks. But Jochi is patient. Out in the freezing cold he measures out instructions on the walkie. “Car 1, be quick with the steering, catch the slide.” Or, “Off the gas, off the gas, patience, wait for it... now gas, gas, gas.” Of course he does get frustrated at times: “Car 8, you were sleeping, be quick with steering.” But he’s always encouraging: “Car 3, excellent slide, I couldn’t have done it better.”

The beauty of the Audi driving experience is that you’re encouraged to drive fast cars hard and fast. We’re asked to switch off traction control. It’s the first time I’ve been told to switch it off, unlike other driving programmes where they rap you on the knuckles if you so much as go near the switch. You get hours and hours of time behind the wheel — two days of non-stop driving. There’s a fabulous set-up, including the all-important tractor. And world championship level instructors with the patience and expertise to dramatically improve your skills. (Jochi guarantees that we will become better drivers by the end.  He isn’t kidding.)

On the second day, once we’ve had time to ruminate over what we’re doing right and wrong, we become naturally quicker. Our instincts get honed. We drive faster, use third gear in places. Jochi shows us how to correct mistakes and kill understeer by kicking the gas pedal to give a sudden surge of power to the rear so that the tail comes around. We develop rhythm and the Scandinavian flicks start to come. I start thinking, making calculations, where to brake and how much, how much throttle, feeding little corrections all the way through. It might not look it but the flick is also a safer way to drive, doubling the steering options by allowing the car to steer on the throttle (as long as it has four-wheel-drive). It turns the throttle into a second steering wheel: more gas to get the tail out, less to get the car tucked in, modulate for it to four-wheel drift. 

It’s of course a technique you’ll never ever use on the road but next time I bump into a Finnish rally driver there’ll be something far more interesting to talk about.

The author is editor, Overdrive. Read a longer version of this article in the magazine’s May edition or at overdrive.in