[Mania] The Authentic Taste of Four-Wheel Drive Experienced on an Ice Lake

If you travel about 1000 km north from Helsinki, Finland, you will reach a village called Muonio. It is a remote place about 200 km above the Arctic Circle, where in January, dawn breaks around 10 a.m. and the sun sets by 2 p.m. Everywhere you look, there is nothing but snowy scenery and birch trees. When you step on untouched snow piled on top of unmelted snow, you sink up to your waist.

German luxury car brand Audi holds an annual event called Ice Experience in a quiet rural village in Northern Europe. As the name suggests, it is a program where you can freely drive high-performance cars on a frozen lake. The stage is a lake called Sarkilompolo, about a 10-minute drive from the accommodation. The frozen lake, about 1.25 km² in size?equivalent to about 170 soccer fields?is covered with snow up to adult knee height. Winding roads are laid out here. There are seven driving courses of various lengths, ranging from a short 370 m to a long 3 km, with a total length exceeding 13 km.

One of the life bucket list items many driving enthusiasts mention is ice driving because it offers an experience that is usually unimaginable. Typically, driving experience events hosted by automakers are conducted under the control of instructors, limiting the performance you can experience. However, here, even beginners can enjoy driving individually after a brief theoretical lesson and by adhering only to minimal safety standards.

Instructors give instructions via walkie-talkie when necessary, such as pressing the accelerator or brake pedal, or steering in the opposite direction. Occasionally, they ride in the passenger seat to explain shortcomings or demonstrate taxi driving themselves.

The course on the 1.5-meter-thick ice lake, covered with low snow, is an ideal place for 'fun driving.' When you quickly turn the steering wheel at a certain speed, the car slides. If the Electronic Stability Control (ESC), a feature essential in recent cars, activates, braking or engine output changes immediately upon sliding. Therefore, ESC is turned off here.

You learn by physically experiencing how to shift the vehicle's center of gravity forward and backward by accelerating or braking and how to steer accordingly. At first, the sliding situation felt awkward, and I often went off course, but I soon got used to it. Even though I am not very skilled at driving, I was able to slide the car through an S-curve and perform a simple drift.

It's just unfamiliar at first, but after a few tries, you get the hang of it. You increase speed and attempt bolder maneuvers on larger curves. The knee-high snow walls along the course act as boundary markers, minimizing damage to the car while intuitively indicating the driving path. It's best not to leave the course, but even if you do, the vehicle is not heavily damaged. If you fail to control the car in time and bounce off the course, a tractor watching from one side of the lake comes to pull the car out. During the two and a half days of group experience, the number of tractor calls and the shortest course completion times are counted, and prizes are awarded.

The car driven at the Ice Experience is Audi's high-performance RS (Renn Sport) 4 Avant. It is a compact wagon model, considered the most fun to drive, and is not sold domestically. Despite its modest size, it uses a 6-cylinder twin-turbo engine producing 450 horsepower. Torque ranges from 1900 to 5000 rpm at 600 Nm, giving a lively initial acceleration. It goes from zero to 100 km/h in 3.9 seconds. The powerful engine is paired with an 8-speed Tiptronic transmission.

Audi's permanent all-wheel-drive system, Quattro, shines on snowy roads. Under normal driving, 60% of the power is sent to the rear axle and 40% to the front. If one axle slips unintentionally, most of the power is quickly transferred to the other side automatically. The distribution of power between the front and rear axles adjusts from 70:30 to 15:85 depending on driving conditions.

While electronic control dominates convenience features and driving, Audi sticks to mechanical four-wheel drive. They believe mechanical systems are much more intuitive than sending signals and controlling driving conditions with numerous sensors. The unique differential plays this role. It distributes driving force to the left and right wheels during turns. Due to inclined components, the force is transmitted along the drive shaft direction. This force acts on friction discs to generate locking torque, which increases traction on the driven wheels.

Although Audi's history as a luxury brand is shorter than German competitors Mercedes or BMW, Audi's sales in Europe surpass theirs largely thanks to Quattro, which applies these principles. Since winters are relatively distinct across Europe, the all-wheel-drive system with quick responsiveness and solid durability is highly valued. Audi introduced the four-wheel-drive system, originally used in military trucks, to passenger cars early on, debuting it in 1980.

At the time, amid the oil crisis and a trend emphasizing vehicle efficiency, there was a perception that applying a heavy four-wheel-drive system to passenger cars was unnecessary. Audi broke this prejudice. From the year after Quattro's release, it stood out in various racing competitions such as the World Rally Championship (WRC). After Audi introduced it, competing automakers also launched their own four-wheel-drive technologies.

Ferdinand Pi?ch, former chairman of the Volkswagen Group and supervisory board, and Audi employees developed and tested the four-wheel-drive system in the Muonio area where the experience event is held. Finland, with its long winters, is still considered a primary location for cold-weather performance testing of developing vehicles. Pi?ch, grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, founder of Porsche and Volkswagen, is also a renowned engineer in automotive history.

After conflicts with Porsche over race car development, Pi?ch moved to Audi and achieved milestones that shaped today's Audi, including Quattro, 5-cylinder engines, diesel turbo direct injection engines, and aluminum bodies. Among Audi vehicles sold worldwide, models equipped with Quattro technology account for 40%, and in South Korea, over 80%.

Pi?ch was initially uninterested in four-wheel-drive sedans but changed his mind after seeing the four-wheel-drive system developed by test engineers and the development team. The project was conducted secretly, and tests were done in Finland. In 1986, a TV commercial showing a car climbing a ski jump ramp with a nearly 40-degree slope using only the car's performance was filmed in Finland.

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