Thank Frankel it's Friday: Crashing Porsches on ice is the most fun

Had this happened in any normal scenario I’d have been so ashamed of myself I’d have thought long and hard about owning up to it in print. In the event, it was so much fun I crashed it again about 10 minutes later. And another four times after that.

Welcome, then, to the weird and wacky world of the Porsche winter driving experience which exists 120 miles above of the arctic circle in the frozen wastes of northern Finland. Here you can skid, drift and spin 911s and Panameras all day long and when you run out of talent, lose concentration or, as I did on at least one occasion, lose control because you’re laughing too much, Porsche will send out a man armed with a Cayenne and a rope who’ll send you on your way within five minutes so you can do it all over again. And they will not tell you to drive more carefully in future.

It is a fascinating experience and for two reasons. The first is obvious: it’s not as much fun as it sounds, it’s actually funnier even than that. You can do slaloms on ice, drive round an enormous fast circle or a tiny slow one. Or you can head off on any number of racetracks Porsche has hewn out of the ice, each one a mini-Nürburgring and work on your technique. Here, when you can stop giggling and actually think for a moment, you will see the physical forces a car exerts and those that are exerted upon it in a form so crystal clear it’s almost impossible not to understand them. You can, of course, choose to ignore them and crash anyway, but that doesn’t matter. This being a press trip, there were dozens of us up there and I expect that few were the minutes when the recovery crews weren’t pulling someone out of a snowbank somewhere, but at the end of the day when I walked down the lines of once gleaming but now snow-spattered Porsches, there wasn’t the smallest dent in any of them.

And that’s the second point. There are lots of places where you can drive on a low friction steering pad and spin with impunity but after a short while you’ll get bored driving very slowly around in a circle. But if you go to any other facility – like a proper race track, getting it wrong has embarrassing and frequently expensive consequences. Your first off will likely be your last. But not here. And the knowledge that you can drive a 570bhp Porsche 911 Turbo S completely over the limit for as long as you can control it, and then for it literally not to matter at all when it goes wrong is spectacularly liberating.

What I discovered was that my car control was a little better than I had expected and that there were times when I was genuinely surprised by what I was able to make the car do. I knew I’d be able to establish and maintain a slide, because I’ve been doing that for decades racing old cars and driving modern ones past photographers on magazine shoots. But I was pleased by the way I was also able not only to use the weight in the back of the 911 to pendulum the car around from the exit of a right hand turn and into a left, but to do with reasonable accuracy while leaving enough mental processing power in reserve to cope with the ever-changing grip levels on the snow and ice. But just when I was starting to believe my own bulls**t, it would suddenly go wrong. The only thing my every off-track excursion had in common is that I never saw it coming. By contrast, there were plenty of times when I’d realised my error, was convinced we were going off yet somehow managed to stay on the track.

What I do know is that driving 911s on ice counts among the most enjoyable things I’ve done with a steering wheel in my hands. And if you’re in a position to write the cheque, you can too. Porsche runs series of five day camps at its base in northern Finland for prices ranging from €5290 to €7290 with a €1490 fee for an additional driver. It’s expensive but looking at how full the remaining camps for this winter are, customers clearly think it’s worth it. Full details are available here: https://drivingexperience.porsche.com/en/home