When we arrived in Novo we were greeted by Andrei, the ALCI station manager. He and Viktor that runs TAC were very excited to experience how our cars will cope in Antarctica. When the cars were out of the plane we put some body screws in the tires, since for some misunderstanding the ice screws for the tires had not been ordered, and took a test drive out to the White Desert Camp. Andrei and Victor came with us and they were very impressed of how fast we could go and how comfortable the cars were. It was obvious that they were expecting us to get into trouble with driving down certain slopes on the way. But the cars did those slopes beautifully, even though you could feel it was very slippery and it was best not to make any major changes of course or speed. The Russians were impressed since we were considerably faster to drive this route on the cars than they usually were on snowmobiles. The White Desert Camps are really luxurious in comparison to other camps in this area.
Opposite the camp is a steep blue ice mountain that the Russians challenged us to test. With only normal body screws instead of special ice screws, and still missing screws altogether we had our concerns. This was a 200 meters high mountain with some steep slopes and some cracks we needed to avoid. But the pressure was on an we decided to go for it and managed to go up to the top even with making some changes of the course. We were a little bit worried regarding driving down those slopes but that did also go well. Everybody was very impressed and we were told that those slopes were much steeper than those we will be facing on the plateau, so we would have nothing to worry about! The cars were really getting the attention they deserved!
Andrei and Viktor drove the cars back to Novo and they drove fast. They were very impressed and wanted to take more test drives, visit more stations. They said that it suddenly looked like the distances had become much shorter! When we came back a lot of the people situated in Novo came to look at the cars, obviously the story was out that those cars were great!
Emil Grímsson.
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