Thomson Reuters Eikon vehicle
- aiming for a new speed record to the South Pole
Follow the attempt for the World Record in real time!
In December 2011 a three man team will set out in one of our Arctic Trucks built vehicles with the aim of beating the old Guinness World Record set in 2005 going from Patriot Hills to South Pole in under 3 days with an average speed of nearly 16km/h to mark the 100 years anniversary of the first successful attempt by Roald Amundsen.
The vehicle used for this attempt is an AT44 built on Toyota Tacoma with a unique styling by Ian Nisbett Design.
The challenge is to improve the current Guinness World Record, driving from Patriot Hills on the Antarctica coast to the South Pole, over 1100 km distance each way.
Patriot Hills is close to where the Ronne Ice Shelf meets the coast of Antarctica. The route (the orange line) approaches the South Pole from West, starts off in near 500 meters altitude and gradually goes up to the highest point at South Pole, 2800meters. This will be the first time an Arctic Trucks vehicle will take this route, but 10 Arctic Trucks vehicles have during the last three years completed the route from Novo (the green line) to the South Pole and back, four of them have done it twice.
The Novo route poses greater challenges, over two times the distance, crossing considerable higher altitude and the most challenging part is that the distance to nearest fuel is 2.5 times longer. The AT44 Expedition Hilux has completed the green line is 4.5 days or 21.4km/h average speed setting a new Guinness World Record as the fasted overland journey to South Pole (see press release). This team was even faster going back, 3.5 days or 27.5km/h average speed.
The Eikon team will take on this challenge one single vehicle and without Arctic Trucks driver/mechanic expert but still has a very good chance of beating the old record from Patriot Hills and very possibly the new record as well. With much shorter distance to fuel, the vehicle does not need to pull a trailer and it has a better suspension setup for speed
Arctic Trucks suggested that for this challenge they would build the vehicle on a Toyota Tacoma which can run on biofuel (E85), as requested by the customer.
The Tacoma before and after the AT44 conversion. Ready for shipment to UK for styling work.
The AT44 modification requires hundreds of man hours but gives this vehicle the capabilities to take on an extreme challenge like this. The modification/rebuilding of the vehicle includes; relocating the front and rear suspension, increasing the wheel base by 160mm and rebuilding the body and frame to fit the large tires with minimal lift to give it stability and the right weight balance for snow driving. With lower weight capacity needed and to cope with more speed, the rear leaf springs are replaced with Arctic Trucks rear coil suspensions system that gives longer travel and greater comfort in rough areas. The drive-line is also rebuilt to take on the extreme cold, extra weight and the large Dick Cepek tires on specially built Arctic Trucks wheels. This includes the rear axle is reinforced, new larger rear differential is installed with lower gear ratios in front and rear, heavy duty HT coil springs, Koni shocks and ARB air lockers. Arctic Trucks designed and added additional fuel tanks, increasing the fuel capacity to 320 liters. To fit the customers budget, optional Arctic Trucks crawler gear was not installed and the buyer choose to integrate the crevasse protection system into the other styling parts installed in the UK.
The styling part includes; new front „face“, hood scope, thick sides steps, roof rail, rear deck cover with scope and a rear „face“ . Temporary fender flairs were installed by Arctic Trucks for test drives and training in Iceland.
Members of the expedition team are; Jason De Carteret, Kieron Bradley and Jason Thomas. The challenge is on and they have opted to go without Arctic Trucks expert drivers/mechanics and do this in a single car. The team has gotten some training from Arctic Trucks experts and have been ensured backup from the ALI base at Union Glacier.
During drivers training in Iceland, Arctic Trucks took the team to Mýrdalsjökull for training how to deal with deep soft snow.