Winter Driving: Porsche Cayenne GTSWith its host of electronics, the Porsche Cayenne GTS makes light work of the tough conditions in the Arctic Circle, writes Kyle Fortune
I nudge the steering to unsettle the Porsche Cayenne GTS and brush the accelerator. There's a flare of revs as the 4.8-litre V8 responds and the big Porsche gently adjusts its attitude and graciously arcs into oversteer. I counter steer to catch it, feathering the accelerator and adjusting the steering to hold a glorious four-wheel drift for what feels like minutes. I've never had so much fun behind the wheel. In anything. And all at around 30-40km/h.
Porsche's four-wheel-drive SUV is so simple to drive at increasingly ludicrous angles due to my location- Sweden. More specifically - aice lake near a small village called Jukkasjärvi around 200km north of the Arctic Circle.
Ice is a way of life in Sweden. It's around so much that they built a hotel out of it. It was -5 degrees in my room, crispy frozen exhaled breath around the opening of my sleeping bag crunching on my cheek when I woke up. Outside it was around -23, and down on the lake, where I'm making a two-tonne SUV do things that just wouldn't normally be possible, it's -30. Chilly then, but clearly not enough to stop the locals going about their daily business.
As well as using snow mobiles, dogs, reindeer and kick sledding, people do drive up here, the conditions meaning it's little wonder that Scandinavia produces so many championship winning rally and race drivers. Driving in Sweden requires greater skills behind the wheel, the locals have an uncanny ability to judge grip levels.
They catch and control slides as if they have not happened and manage to maintain speeds on the icy roads that would have most of us in a ditch.
Snow specific tyres help by giving phenomenal traction, even more so if they're studded, cars here required by law to have winter tyres fitted. The Cayenne I'm driving does without traction enhancing metal studs, but the snow tyres still give amazing purchase on surfaces that are difficult to stand on.
It's hardly surprising that so many car manufacturers do cold weather testing up here. The conditions are consistently good, the 50-100cm thick ice covering the lakes being the perfect surface to hone electronic stability and traction control systems. The Cayenne GTS features plenty, their effect when on being truly remarkable. The four-wheel-drive inevitably helps, the drive being split 38 per cent in the front and 62 per cent in the rear. But it's the PTM, Porsche traction management, and PSM, Porsche Stability management, which incorporates traction control and an automatic brake differential that combine to give the Cayenne quite staggering ability on the glass-like ice.
As impressive as the electronics are, it's more fun when you turn them off. With nothing to hit apart from the odd soft snowbank I spent hours driving the Cayenne like a rally driver, convincing myself that I could be pretty good. That is until I got a chance to sit beside a proper ex-world championship rally driver, Walter Rohrl, in a 911 Turbo. He prefers the electronics off too but, unlike me, he's able to place the 911 exactly where he wants it. All at quite ludicrous speeds and while still having the spare mental capacity to answer questions from the hack sitting next to him.
For most of the day I was a driving god, that is until I met a real one.