Dancing on ice?

But there are no flies on me. I will expose this sham for what it really is, I thought, as the aircraft touched down at Sweden’s Arvidsjaur Flygplats, 70 miles south of the Arctic Circle. I am Ralph Nader in a winter coat and sturdy boots.

Car manufacturers have been sending folk here for 50 years, ever since a handful of Bosch engineers realised the vast expanse of a frozen lake would give them all the space they needed to assess forthcoming cars in low grip conditions and develop new technologies like ABS. For the first three months of every year, thousands of engineers from around the world descend on otherwise sleepy Swedish towns like Arvidsjaur and Arjeplog, plus others in Finland and Norway, apparently to fine-tune stability control programmes, anti-lock braking systems and torque vectoring strategies.

And that would be my cover story, too, if I could get away with it. Those Bosch boffins half a century ago would have felt that wonderful sensation of a car sliding on a slippery surface first in one direction, before gliding elegantly the other way, then necked a skinful of Mariestads that evening and thought, ‘We’ll do this every year.’

So what actually goes on up there each winter? I’ll find out on Kilver Lake, which I spot from the air on final approach to Arvidsjaur. It’s the one with a facsimile of the Nürburgring Grand Prix track etched into its frozen surface. There I’ll find a fleet of electric Audis and a handful of the company’s calibration engineers waiting for me – ready, I’m assured, to tell me everything I want to know about winter testing.

This isn’t Audi’s own facility – that, the mysteriously named KALT 1, is 30 minutes northwest of here. The VW Group’s private (and secure) winter proving ground, it covers 9000 acres – almost twice the size of Frankfurt airport – with more than 50 miles of test tracks. There are workshops and offices, plus a 440-bed hotel. Using GPS technology, a fleet of tractors scratch the exact same courses into the lake’s frozen surface year after year.

Kilver Lake is far smaller, but should be adequate for our purposes. The ice must be at least 10 inches thick to safely carry the weight of a car, although I’m told it’s even thicker than that right now. Looking at the cracks that criss-cross the ice like the creases in the palms of your hands, I rather hope it is.

I arrive on an unusually warm day for Arvidsjaur in early March, the mercury just about climbing above freezing. This presents Audi’s engineers with a problem – warmer temperatures and bright sunshine melt the ice, lubricating the track and making the surface especially slippery. Given that they come here primarily for consistent track conditions, that’s a problem. (They’re relieved when temperatures drop below -20 degrees C overnight and the next day is far cooler.)

I’ll drive two cars while I’m here. The first is the RS e-tron GT, Audi’s flagship EV. With two motors, a mechanical LSD in the rear axle, three-chamber air springs and rear-wheel steering, it’s just about as complex as modern cars get. The e-tron S Sportback does without some of that technology, but it has three motors rather than two – one for each rear wheel and a single motor up front.

My heart soars when I spot the studded tyres fitted to the RS e-tron GT. They have 3mm spikes poking out of their tread, which I’m told aren’t road legal, even around here. They don’t quite look like the black, round porcupines that Rally Sweden-spec WRC machines use, but they should give far more grip on the ice than plain winter tyres or road-approved 1mm studs. It may seem odd to travel all this way to a frozen hinterland only to fit grippier tyres, but it’s all about striking the right balance. I know from past experience that shorter studs, or no studs at all, leave you with so little grip on the lake you slip and slide about pointlessly, like a two-tonne Bambi.

We’re running the replica Nürburgring GP track in reverse. The scale is all wrong and without any gradient change or visual cues like grandstands, I don’t recognise any of the corners other than the looping hairpin at the bottom of the circuit. The car is in Dynamic mode and the ESP is switched off, meaning as I sweep through the tight switchbacks and the flowing, quicker turns, the Audi is a handful.

It feels determined to do its own thing. I twirl away at the steering wheel and dance the Riverdance on the pedals, wondering why it understeers limply one corner, then slides heroically the next. With all the active systems working away furiously – distributing torque between the four corners, nipping a brake or two, manipulating the angle of the rear wheels – the car feels unnatural. I crave a simpler machine, one with a combustion engine I can command with my right foot, a driven rear axle and no electronic assistance whatsoever.

But then I figure out how the car wants to be driven. The key is to carry a little more speed into each corner than you think wise for sheet ice. Those 3mm studs will claw into the surface and tuck the car’s nose in. Get your entry right and the rear will gladly swing around behind you, so you’re sliding even before the apex. Then you stand on the power and keep your foot firmly in, unwinding the steering lock as the car arcs around into a graceful drift, but never applying anything more than a flick of corrective lock.

Sawing at the wheel and jumping on and off the power confuses the car. It’ll pull itself straight to save you from yourself. Send clear, deliberate signals, though, and it does exactly what you ask of it. That’s when the RS e-tron GT is most fun – the torque of two enormous electric motors sending the car swinging wildly through one turn, and the pendulum effect as you tweak the steering wheel at just the right moment provoking another slide in the opposite direction, a sequence of turns linked with great, sweeping slides.

Whether you’re on dry tarmac, loose gravel or a frozen lake, that is the best feeling there is to be had at the wheel of a motor vehicle. Out here, it’s just easier and safer than anywhere else. And when the dynamics are that entertaining, I find I don’t worry so much about all the other aspects of a good driving experience, like changing gear or a soaring engine note. (Mind you, I have also driven a studded Lamborghini Aventador SVJ on ice and that had a certain something about it…)

But calibration engineers don’t come all this way just to behave like Nordic Ken Blocks. Audi’s Mattes Reiling, a stability control specialist, tells me he has two levers he can pull – braking and torque. He can pinch the brake at this corner or send a little extra drive to that one, but that’s it. For a moment he makes it sound simple. ‘But braking and torque are not just on or off,’ he points out. ‘There are any number of points in between. And remember, there are four wheels all doing something different at once.’ He must also consider surface conditions, various tyre compounds, the ever-shifting weight distribution of a car on the move, numerous driving modes and levels of ESP intervention, whatever the driver happens to be doing with the wheel and pedals at any given moment, and goodness knows what else.

It all adds up to millions of lines of computer code, an unfathomably complex electronic brain with digital synapses firing like a New Year’s Eve pyrotechnics display. The objective of a modern ESP system is not only to prevent or catch a slide, but to make a car faithfully execute the commands of the driver – they are active, not reactive. These systems have evolved so much that they’re working busily away beneath you as you steer, accelerate and brake, long before the little orange light in your instrument cluster has begun blinking at you. If they’re well calibrated, you’ll have no idea anything’s happening at all.

Importantly, car makers don’t send teams of engineers up here just to validate new models for wintry weather. In fact, the work that’s done here informs the way a car behaves in all conditions. Reiling says there are 50 individual dynamic tests a new Audi will undertake during its development – 15 of those are conducted on snow and ice. Split-surface braking, high-speed lane changes and the slalom are key winter testing manoeuvres.

Empirical data is important, says Reiling, but how a car feels is the primary consideration. That’s where experience and collaborating closely with colleagues becomes fundamentally important, edging closer and closer as a team to a final outcome. What’s more, every new model must exhibit the same basic handling traits as any other car from the stable: an Audi must feel like an Audi.

Apparently, that means spontaneous response to steering inputs with both axles in harmony on the way into a corner, neutral and progressive handling at the apex, then the option for power oversteer away from the bend with only minimal steering correction required. A fair description of Audi’s electric cars, the R8 supercar and the latest RS3, but not many others, in my experience.

These guys love EVs because electric motors respond so much faster and with more precision than combustion engines. It means Reiling and his colleagues can unleash every torque vectoring hex in the calibration engineer’s spell book. These guys aren’t looking backwards, all misty eyed.

They also work with all the usual diligence and rigour of an OEM development driver. When I manhandle the e-tron S around a small handling circuit in a series of linked powerslides, accelerator pedal pinned from apex to exit, the engineer beside me laughs, ‘Okay, but this isn’t how we do it when we’re working!’

I understand now what a hopeless ESP calibrator I would make. I would just want to turn off the system I was supposed to be refining, powering my way around the lake like a budget Ari Vatanen instead. I’d never get any actual work done. And I’m not sure how long I’d last through a dark, icy Swedish winter, hours from the nearest city.

I was once told a story about a Jaguar Land Rover chassis engineer who had spent several weeks in Arjeplog. He thought he was coping with the isolation and the short days and long nights just fine, right up until he found himself in a child’s playground one day pushing a pair of water-filled ballast dummies in the swings, laughing hysterically to himself. A place like this can do funny things to your mind over time.

So it seems this whole winter testing thing isn’t a ruse after all. There really is an awful lot of very earnest work going on up here; work that’s making your next car safer than ever. But just to be absolutely certain, I think I’ll check again next winter.