To Antarctica Again
Following a very successful trip to the Magnetic North Pole with Top Gear in 2007 Arctic Trucks modified four cars to serve as support vehicles in the “Amundsen Omega 3 Pole Race” to the South Pole which took place from December 2008 to February 2009.
This was not the first time Arctic Trucks sent vehicles to Antarctica, in 1997/1998 Arctic Trucks sent two heavily modified Toyota Land Cruiser 80 on a very successful mission to Antarctica with the Swedish scientific Polar Institute.
View photos from the Expedition to Antarctica 1997-98
The main reason the organizers for this ski race asked Arctic Trucks to supply cars for this project comes after their experience seeing the performance of these vehicles during The Top Gear polar special program. The belt driven vehicles have a long history in Antarctica and have proven their worth but fuel consumption can be many times that of the cars and the cost of the vehicle is higher.
This time two of the cars followed the competitors as support vehicles and the other two vehicles carried a film crew from BBC. The film crew made four TV shows about the race, called "On thin ice", which were shown on BBC in the summer of 2009.
Arctic Trucks sent two driver/mechanic experts, Gísli Jónsson and Hjalti V. Hjaltason, on this trip and they drove over 6 thousand kilometres from he Russian station Novo on the coast, to the South Pole and back. This was a great challenge since they needed to find a way they could drive up to the mountains where the altitude is over 6000 meters, crossing moving glaciers, with lots of crevasse and pulling many tons of fuel and supplies. Once they were up to on the high plate the vehicles needed to cross a huge area with largely unknown conditions, make a film and support the competitors in the ski race. You can read their diary from 2007/2008 and look at the fantastic photos they took.
To make a long story short, both the cars and our drivers did a fantastic job in this expedition, which is the reason they were asked to return a year later to work on the cars and help with some difficult tasks on the high plate.