Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson Page A

what you see cruising up and down the King’s Road on a Saturday. The tyres, for a kickoff, are two feet wide and equipped with scoop-like flaps to give extra grip. The chassis are massively altered too, elongated and beefed up so that they stay in one piece after a 100-foot drop.
    Then there are the engines, which must be capable of getting the car up the 100-foot climb in the first place. They are, basically, tuned V8s of 5- or 7-litre capacity but, for that little extra something, when you hit the gas hard, ultra-cold nitrous oxide is brought into play, giving a total of 900 horsepower.
    To put that in perspective, Michael Shoemaker’s Benetton develops somewhere in the region of 600 bhp. These Icelandic Jeeps are absolutely terrifying, a point that was hammered home when Gisli Jonsson, the current champion, took me out for a spin.
    The course is laid out over what, in Britain, we’d call a quarry. And what you do is drive up the walls, the idea being that the first part of the climb is nearly vertical and the last ten to twelve feet, completely sheer. And you get no run-up.
    Once at the top, you turn round, come halfway down again and then, turn round on a slope that looks virtually vertical, crab along it and then go straight up again. To describe it as impossible is to underestimate the seriousness of the task.
    Gisli agreed that some of the slopes were, indeed, out of the question, but added, ‘We’ll give them a try anyway.’ Then he hit three-quarter power and with the wheels spinning like a washing machine on its final spin cycle we rocketed skywards. And, as the front wheels hit the vertical part of the wall, his right foot welded the pedal to the metal, the nitro kicked in, my kidneys exploded and whoosh, we were at the top.
    Except ‘whoosh’ is the wrong word. I have stood underneath a hovering Harrier. I have heard a brace of Tornadoes do a combat-power military take off. I’ve seen Judas Priest live and I’ve been in a Formula One pit when they’ve taken a V10 to 17,000 rpm, but these sounds are whisper-quiet compared to Gisli’s Jeep. We’re talking bird song at the World Pile-Driver Competition.
    With such a massive assault being mounted on one sense, the others go into shutdown, which is a good thing because my eyes simply refused to believe what was happening.
    I’d been told that the nitro needs to come in at the exact moment the rear wheels hit the vertical part of the slope, causing them to bounce away from the rock face and thus, hopefully, causing the car to rock over the lip. It didn’t make much sense at the time and having done it, it makes even less now.
    But there was worse to come. On the way down, Gisli swung the wheel over to the left so that we drove across this sheer rock face.
    He had no gear-changing to worry about – it’s automatic – but even so, things often go wrong. Cars roll down the banks all the time but that said, in ffiteen years, no competitor has ever been injured. This, frankly, was cold comfort, because I was scared out of my mind – and I’m talking about scared in the bowel-loosening sense. The last time that someone was this scared, he was about eight and he was having a nightmare about some headless monsters eating his mum and dad.
    Three things stopped me from asking Gisli to stop. First, I’m British. Second, I couldn’t make myself heard. And third, I was sitting on my arms to stop them flailing about if we rolled. So I simply sat there, wishing to God that I was an accountant.
    And then it was over and I went for a ride on a Yamaha Wave Runner.
    Nothing odd in that. You did it a hundred times whenyou were on holiday. Aha. But have you done it in an Icelandic lake, while wearing jeans? No? I thought not.
    There was a bit of a wind and, therefore, because it was a big lake, a bit of a chop, but there was nothing to warn me about what was to come. What came the first time I hit a wave hard was a series of large icicles which ploughed into my face,