It’s a consequence of being a nerdy petrolhead that, despite most of us living thousands of miles away from northern Scandinavia, we’re familiar with the strange names of Arvidsjaur, Arjeplog and Rovaniemi.
These settlements are the storied and chillingly remote testing hubs around which nearly every European car maker congregates each winter. They use facilities both public and hidden to tune ABS software, examine real-world fluid viscosity at -30deg C and so on.
With limited sunlight and horrendously low temperatures, it is a brutal testing environment in every respect.
Never mind the machinery: test engineering teams dispatched from everywhere from Crewe to Bologna can find it mentally tough, even on a relatively short, week-long rotation. It’s dark and cold and the work itself can be dangerous and frustrating.
I love visiting these places. I realise this is akin to the Islingtonite who spends the weekend in rural Devon and finds it wonderfully quaint and bucolic, unable to see the plight of farmers barely able to carve out a living and villages struggling after GP closures and cancelled bus routes.
The experience of the journalist invited to spend 36 hours in Lapland, skidding a prototype on a frozen lake or shadowing the traction control wizards as they flow a development car down an ice road at impossible speeds, is not reality. But it is nonetheless an enchanting experience, and the only time in life I look forward to packing long johns.
Now clearly the engineering side of these trips is the main event, and it’s reliably very interesting indeed. Car makers use an Arctic environment to assess everything from whether a handbrake freezes overnight to how torque vectoring can ensure a 2.5-tonne saloon remains loosely controllable even if it finds itself in an unintended slide at serious speed.
The personnel tend to be great value too. A few weeks earlier they might have been with the cars in South Africa or Death Valley. It’s a fascinating, exhausting life and gold on the Dictaphone.
But it’s the atmosphere that really gets to me – the vibe. If you’re heading up to Rovaniemi, you fly into Helsinki, passing over the autonomous Åland archipelago between the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia.
The islands are visible from the plane and set a surreal tone that doesn’t fully lift until you’re passing back over them on the way home. At Helsinki you land and head to a far-flung domestic terminal (where you might spy Mercedes design chief Gorden Wagener with his Louis Vuitton luggage – true story).
On the second plane of the day there’s a good chance you will sit next to a young military conscript in fatigues.
To enhance the heading-to-the-edge-of-civilisation vibe, you might want to listen to something comfortingly bleak and meditative. The 1991 album Blå Koral by Knut Reiersrud and Iver Kleive is perfect. You land in total blackness, snakes of icy snow gusting across the runway.
Then off to a wood-panelled hotel with the heating set to solar flare. It’s basic but good, with poronkäristys-reindeer stew – for dinner. The next morning it’s an early start.
On the way to the car, freshly milled fluffsnö underfoot, your nose hairs freeze. Then you’re off to frozen lakes and along powdery rat runs through forests so dense that they feel pretty ghoulish. It’s invigorating, humbling and just a little spiritual.