Features

'We didn't want to die' seems a favourite, followed by 'I'm really fond of my fingers... and having the ability to hold things'. It doesn't help. We have to keep going, at least for a bit. Have to try.

It's hard though; the Ariel slips, scrabbles and spins along roads composed solely of sheet ice and snowy fluff as lorries stamp quickly past on studded tyres.

A two-hour stint feels as if you've been battered senseless and fingers become randomly, painfully numb. Toes. I remember toes.

The countryside is a dirty blizzard of white, nothing to see except dual carriageway and the occasional Colgate-white shock of sunlight. There is no distance view. Thinking slows, brains take longer to engage and hatred for the evil bastards in the warm Land Rover festers.

Local police prick up their collective ears, not entirely sure the Atom is road legal, and end up smiling wryly at these orange puffer-suited, crazy Brits, trekking to the Arctic Circle in a collection of motorsport scaffolding.

Our smiles are starting to look a little less broad and a whole lot more forced. The temperature, according to the Discovery's gauge, is dropping to -10. Chemical heat pads are stuffed into gloves and boots, two balaclavas are worn under helmets and still we freeze.

The suits and jackets are keeping our torsos and legs warm, but the chill oils itself through the gloves and boots and creeps up arms and legs. Like being dipped in icy treacle, feet and fingertips first. It sucks.

We reach Oslo the first night and decide not to turn back quite yet because we aren't quitters. Some mutual backslapping occurs for getting this far, a moment of hubris, and we think seriously about lying about getting there.

We decide not to, and it proves to be yet another bookmark in our litany of daft. Overnight, the temperature drops to -32 and both headlights on the Atom shatter from the cold.

And that's without wind chill; with it, at 60mph, sitting in the full blast of an Atom's bare frontage, you're looking at a continuous -55.