They start work on the tracks as winter comes and the ground starts to freeze, layering ice through twists and turns and humps and hollows. The surface glistens now in the watery Arctic sunlight, a hard refrigerator whiteness under a sugary dusting of fresh snow.
The naturally aspirated flat-six engine at my backside idles hungrily at 1,000 rpm as I scan the digital display bolted where the instruments used to be. Traction control and stability control off. Brake bias almost fully to the rear. ABS on the lowest setting. I cinch the full harness one more time, then tug the shifter into drive and flick it left, into manual mode.
First, second, third, wheelspin all the way. Then it’s on the brakes, back to second, a left-right flick, on the gas, and quick hands on the Alcantara-rimmed steering wheel to dial in just the right amount of opposite lock. The Porsche Cayman GT4 Clubsport is exuberantly, exultantly sideways, a 420-hp thrill ride yowling through the snowy pines, a cloud of shredded ice billowing in its wake.
It’s good to be the king.
You need to be the king: With prices ranging from about $8,000 to about $14,000, depending on whether you’re willing to share a car or want one all to yourself, a session of Porsche’s Ice Force Pro certainly ain’t cheap. (Oh, and those prices don’t include airfares.) But if you really love driving, it’s one of the most exhilarating and informative experiences you’ll ever have behind the wheel.
Other automakers—JLR and Mercedes-AMG among them—run ice driving experiences. But Porsche, which started performance driving programs in 1974 to help customers master the menace of the 930 Turbo, and which has been conducting ice driving events since 1990, takes the concept to a whole new level.
Ice Force Pro is one of four ice driving experiences Porsche offers customers at its purpose-built facility near the Finnish ski resort of Levi, 110 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The entry-level program is called Ice Experience and is designed for those who’ve never driven a car quickly on ice and snow, let alone a Porsche. Next is Ice Pro, which ups the ante in terms of the difficulty of the tracks. Ice Force Pro adds an extra element in terms of the hardware—in addition to the all-wheel-drive 992-series 911 Carrera 4S, our program included sessions in 911 GT3s and Cayman GT4 Clubsports. Above that is Ice Cup, a program built solely around mastering Porsche’s factory race cars—the GT4 Clubsport and the 911 GT3 Cup—on surfaces so slick you can barely walk across them.
How? Studded tires. For our program the Carrera 4S and GT3s were fitted with Finnish-made Nokian Hakkapeliitta 8 winter tires with about 200 0.15-inch studs per tire. The Cayman GT4 Clubsports were fitted with tires from Finnish specialist rally and high-performance tiremaker Lappi Winter Tire, each bristling with more than 550 0.2-inch studs. And, as I was about to discover over the next three days, the difference in grip was startling.
For the Ice Force Pro experience, two instructors, who take turns driving a Cayenne SUV support vehicle loaded with snatch-em straps to tug errant Porsches out of snowbanks, look after groups of five to six cars.
Our group’s instructors boasted pretty solid credentials. Mark Wallenwein comes from a rallying dynasty: Grandfather Kurt and father Thomas were rally drivers; sister Eve and brother Sandro are rally drivers; and Mark was the 2012 German Rally Champion. Andy Mayrl has spent most of his life sliding on ice, having been a member of the Italian Junior Ski Team and the Italian Bobsled Team. When he’s not in Finland he works as a tire tester for Porsche and campaigns a 964-series 911 ice racer in his spare time.
The Porsche Driving Area at Levi comprises 41 different driving venues, from skidpads and slalom courses to handling tracks in open terrain and tight faux-rally stages that wind through the forest and feature tricky elevation changes. We start with some simple circle work in the Carrera 4S.
The trick to getting a 911 to rotate is to make sure you put weight on the front axle as you turn in. A lift off the throttle or a quick dab on the brakes does the job, the mass of the rear-mounted engine pulling the tail out like a brick on the end of a string. As our time in the GT3s would later confirm, in a rear-wheel-drive 911 you need to quickly grab an armful of opposite lock and carefully modulate the throttle to get weight back on the rear wheels, increasing traction and slowing the sideways motion. But in the all-wheel-drive C4S you can go—you need to go—to power much earlier, and you don’t need anywhere near as much countersteering.
If you get it right, once past the initial turn-in phase, the front wheels should be pointing pretty much straight ahead as the car drifts through the turn in a balanced, graceful arc. Run wide, and you simply turn in to the corner; come too close to the inner bank, countersteer. And all the time you should be on a constant throttle.
Our first day was all in the C4S, the circle work followed by some slaloming to hone our Scandinavian flicks—the brusque side-to-side motions on corner entry invented by rally drivers from Finland, Sweden, and Norway in the ’60s to get their lugubrious, underpowered Volvos and Saabs sideways and around even the tightest of turns with minimal loss of precious momentum.
After that, it was onto a series of level tracks with a selection of fast and slow corners of open and decreasing radius to put our technique to the test.
We finished well after dark (at 68 degrees north latitude in late January, the sun sets before 3 p.m. ). After more than six hours at the wheel my shoulders were aching. But I’d learned a lot. Get a rear-drive car sideways at more than 45 degrees to the direction of travel, and you’ll generally have a hard time stopping from it spinning. However, an all-wheel-drive car can be brought back from seemingly impossible slip angles if you stay on the power. Years of muscle memory had long made that feel counterintuitive to me. But on the ice, kinetics amplified at modest speeds, it was obvious.
Day two started with helmets and HANS devices and contorting my 6-foot-2 frame into the roll-cage-shrouded cockpit of the Cayman GT4 Clubsport. After a session or two on the flat handling tracks, we headed over to the forest tracks.
Every other time I’ve driven at speed on ice, it’s been on a track carved on a frozen lake. What makes Porsche’s icy forest tracks unique and extra challenging is they run between the trees and have elevation changes. This is where I fell in love with the GT4 Clubsport. At its heart, it might be a factory race car—designed to hot-lap road courses like Laguna Seca and VIR—but in Finland, on studded tires, it felt like the greatest old-school rally car I’ve ever driven.
The Cayman GT4 Clubsport has less grunt than the 911 C4S—420 hp and 313 lb-ft of torque versus 443 hp and 390 lb-ft—but it’s also 577 pounds lighter, which gives it a superior power-to-weight ratio. What’s more crucial, however, is how the weight is distributed.
With its twin-turbo 3.0-liter flat-six slung out behind the rear wheels, almost 64 percent of the Carrera 4S’ mass rides on the rear axle. But the 3.8-liter naturally aspirated flat-six in the GT4 Clubsport is mounted midships, ahead of the rear wheels, resulting in the rear axle carrying 55 percent of the car’s mass. Kinematics you can barely sense while driving a car on the road are instantly obvious on the ice: Whereas the 911’s rear end swings wide the moment you unload the rear axle, the yaw rate in the Cayman is much less exponential and much more controllable.
But it wasn’t just that the GT4 Clubsport was light and low, balanced and powerful; I could lean so much much harder on the heavily studded Lappi Winter Tires than was possible in either the C4S or the GT3. It felt almost as if I was driving on the roads I rallied on back in Australia, as if the tire was building small berms of gravel under braking and then while sliding that slowed and supported the car. Porsche toyed with building a Cayman GT4 rally car for the FIA R-GT Cup, part of the World Rally Championship, and the concept shown a year ago was in Finland to give joyrides to selected Ice Experience customers. Insiders say the project has been quietly shelved. Pity.
On the morning of day three, I stepped out of the GT4 Clubsport and into the 494-hp 911 GT3. This not only provided a lesson in understanding the impact of weight distribution on vehicle dynamics, but also highlighted some of the more subtle differences between all-wheel drive and rear-drive 911s, particularly on the tight, twisty, and undulating forest tracks.
The GT3 rewarded patience in tight corners. Too aggressive a flick on corner entry or too much power too early would almost invariably result in a spin.
I’ve always left-foot braked in two-pedal cars, right from when I’d drive my mum’s Torqueflite-equipped Valiant station wagon as a 16-year-old. Here, I found the technique ideal for adjusting the GT3’s trajectory through the faster third- and fourth-gear corners, the merest brush of the pedal initiating just enough weight transfer to unload the rear axle slightly and get the front to bite, rotating the car further to effectively tuck the nose in to the corner and tighten my line without lifting off the throttle.
After a thrilling morning in the GT3, I thought I’d nailed the 911 on ice by the time I got back into the C4S for our third and final afternoon behind the wheel. But I found I couldn’t get the precision I’d had in the rear drive car. It was instructor Andy, watching from the sidelines, who figured out the problem: “Don’t left-foot brake in the middle of the corner,” he said over the radio as I drifted through the turn in front of him. “It opens the clutches in the all-wheel-drive system and changes the way the power is distributed.” Aha! The C4S rotates on corner entry just like the GT3, but adjusting its trajectory mid-drift is more about steering the front wheels in the direction you want to travel than transferring weight between the front and rear axles via brake and throttle.
Porsche has invested plenty in its all-electric Taycan, and this year a fleet of top-of-the-range Turbo S models is among the 144 cars stationed in Finland for Ice Experience work. It’s a reminder that despite all the fun, this whole program is a shrewdly crafted business. Porsche knows customers who can afford to come here are likely to have the money to buy a Taycan. As such, this is a unique opportunity to get them to experience the car in a way that’ll have them bragging to their friends when they get back home.
Our time in the Taycan Turbo S was the least rewarding experience of the lot, however, primarily because Porsche is still figuring out what can be done with the car on ice. With big horsepower and oodles of instant-on torque, the dual-motor, all-wheel-drive Taycan Turbo S is a rocket ship on the tarmac.
But to reduce the prospect of this 5,121-pound electric vehicle being buried in snowbanks beyond easy retrieval, all the Taycans are fitted with Nokian Hakkapeliitta 8 tires with studs less than half the length of those on the C4S, and driving activity is restricted to the skid pans with plenty of runoff room. There was so little grip, our driving experience felt more like curling than drifting—once you’d initiated a direction change you were pretty much a passenger, a hostage to physics as the big Porsche skated down the sheet, gyrating gently.
Porsche’s Ice Force Pro is about the most fun you can ever have in a car; a bucket-list experience of the first order for the serious driver. Should you pay full price to have a car all to yourself, with more than 15 hours of wheel time on a variety of tracks under the supervision of knowledgeable and enthusiastic instructors, it’s invaluable for honing fundamental performance driving skills.
Because ice dramatically amplifies the action-reaction kinematics of a car in motion, the impact of even tiny differences in things like weight distribution, throttle and brake application, and steering angles makes it a masterclass in understanding the nuances of vehicle dynamics.
I’ve been testing cars for more than 35 years now. But Ice Force Pro taught this old dog some new tricks.