From the archives: the Ferrari F430 Spider in the world’s longest tunnel

For some reason, my reaction to intense stress in wilderness/survival situations is to mentally count the food I have with me (eight cans of Red Bull, eight Jordans Crunch bars, a Jaffa Cake and six Mr Kipling Country Slices) but eventually I get it together long enough to bring us to a wobbly stop on the nearest snowy verge. We shudder to a rest outside the mountain tunnel through which we were passing, and a mixture of adrenalin and caffeine soon have me shaking like a drunk. We’re OK. We’re not dead. No worries.

This feature was first published in Issue 152 of Top Gear magazine (2006)

I get out, take a look at where we are, wince, glance down at the three-inch hole in the sidewall of the shredded tyre, wince again, and commence swearing and stamping around like I’m being attacked by a swarm of invisible bees. We really aren’t going anywhere without a trailer. I am, quite uniquely in my experience, seriously pissed off with Norwegian road planners and their minions.

It doesn’t really matter. The moment the car slewed away with its automotive clubfoot, the horrible realisation came that I’m by a tunnel halfway up a Norwegian mountain (but don‘t know which tunnel), I’ve just broken my (borrowed) £140k car, Norway doesn’t have any Ferrari dealers, it’s getting dark at half-past two in the afternoon, it’s minus four and I’ve forgotten my gloves. The mountain of ice behind us is creaking like a rusty iron bedstead and small bits keep falling off. Towards us.

I panic. There’s a brief scuffle as the rest of the team tries to prevent me from creating an emergency Ray Mears-style bivouac from a stray piece of Armco and three sweaters, but eventually I calm down enough to take stock. I’ve promised Ferrari that the only UK press F430 Spider will come back without being stripped for parts by toothless Norwegians with crossbows, and we aren’t even nearly safe, even if you mentally squint. The rest of the team seems more jolly, and keep taking snaps of the eye-strainingly beautiful views while standing with their hands on their hips and sighing like contentedly busted boilers. This isn’t helping.

See, we’ve been driving through easily some of the most inspiring countryside I’ve laid eyes on in a long time and I think it’s taking their minds off the issue. It’s been the kind of stuff that makes you lean forward in your seat to see what breath-catching vista is lurking round the next bend, ready to try and pop your eyeballs out of your head. Makes you wish for a chameleon’s independently swivelly 360-degree eyes, because with the roof down there’s always some achingly cool waterfall or crag-fest to miss behind you. It’s the kind of country you slow down to take in, and then realise that to get a proper handle on some of the views you’d have to actually stop for a bit. Like, say, a year.

The roof of the Spyder has been down for a nice portion – except when horizontal rain decided to play hunt-the-gap-in-the-sweater – and sat in a little bubble of hot gas with the roof off and the heater up, it’s like being on a safari for geologists. Obviously there’s not as much tracking as if we were going for big game, but the sense of awe at the natural world is right up there. It looks like the mountains have been having a falling out, and have knocked chunks out of each other. 

The sky is the colour of 10-day-old bruises, and even the trees are almost violently green against the greys and browns of the rock. But it’s not depressing. Just crushingly majestic. It tends to make you feel very, very small. And very, very young. But let’s not forget this is a harsh place. One that could catch out the unwary traveller, the one without a spare wheel, for instance. I can’t help thinking how cool polar bears look, right up to the point they bite off your head.

Perhaps I’d better explain. The idea behind this gigantic trip is that if you ever get yourself in a Ferrari Spider of any description and you have any love of engines at all, the first thing you need to do is get yourself into some kind of enclosed space, rev the nuts off it, and give yourself an eargasm. Obviously you can do this in your garage, but the slight disadvantage of choking to death on your own enjoyment can be a little too Michael Hutchence for my liking. Far better to find a tunnel and hit it when you can get a clear run between speed cameras. So, being Top Gear we decided to go to the longest tunnel in the world – the Laerdal Tunnel in Norway.

So we jumped aboard the ferry to Kristiansand for 18 hours, and motored through the icy backroads until we, er, broke the Ferrari. Now Ferrari is on the end of a very crackly phone line saying that it will “see what it can do”. I really can’t see anything those guys can do from an office in the UK, so proceed to panic a little more, just to keep warm.

After much back and forth and slightly whinnying descriptions of where we are and just how badly prepared we can possibly be (I didn’t mention the Country Slices), we pump some ‘get you home’ gunk into the tyre and drive very slowly on a flat tyre to the village of Roldahl, where we hunker down in a small shed in a caravan park because it’s the only place we can find to stay this far out of season.

Then we eat reindeer bolognese bought from the local petrol station and boiled to perfection by Lee, our photographer. We try not to look at each other, while wiping the last vestiges of tyre sealant out of our hair.

Ferrari, in the best tradition, mounts a rescue mission. If you have access to some suitably stirring music (I found I was whistling The Dam Busters March in my head throughout the whole episode), this is the bit where you should be playing it at strenuous volume. Two engineers jump on a plane at an hour’s notice, with a balanced wheel and tyre as hand luggage, and a tool bag in the hold. They fly to Bergen (which is nowhere near us), hire a car and drive to the local ferry, which is shut.

Eventually they get across the mighty fjord, and appear at our shed at 6am after travelling all night across a frozen mountain range in a Ford Focus and, bizarrely, they’re smiling. Perhaps in relief at not dying in a budget rent-a-car somewhere unlocatable up a mountain. They are still wearing their official Ferrari coats and still manage to give me a ticking off for the state of the paintwork. Having changed the wheel in approximately three minutes, they attach a laptop, disengage any worrying warning lights from the dash, and leave. They were with us for 12 minutes. It’s like being hit by the service crew version of the SAS. In. Sort it. Out.

They travelled 18 hours for that and it’s unclear whether that would have happened if I had merely rung the AA. I’m left smoking a cigarette in a deserted caravan park on a Norwegian mountain with the vague sense that something utterly unreal just happened.

It has. But the Ferrari’s fixed. And, after a few more phone calls, a few rough calculations and a few crossed fingers, it means we’re still Laerdal Tunnel bound. I’m not sure I want to see any more bloody tunnels. But it seems churlish to head home with our tails between legs after having come so far.

Getting there proves to be one of the world’s great drives, if a little slower than I might have attempted if had I not been worried about a second bout of stranding. The views just keep on mugging our senses with the experience equivalent of an iron bar. Norway out of season becomes something straight out of Grimm’s. Big country. More spiky, dragon-dentistry mountains spearing skywards, jaws clamping hard on the sky. Nature with proper teeth and not emasculated by some development dork with a JCB and too little imagination.

The Ferrari slices through fjord-cut valleys in the pouring rain, mist hanging 100ft above like a fairy curtain, spray making tail lights twinkling red dots in the distance. I become convinced I have seen a troll eating a bagel by the roadside, but decide that could be the result of sleep deprivation and caffeine-induced hallucinations.

The support car loses touch quickly, picking us up again as we realise that, when the tourists aren’t here to witness it, the Norwegians break open the road-building manual and make repairs to every available surface no longer covered in snow. Not great for a 198mph supercar, having to pick its way through unmetalled roads full of ruts and troughs even our Skoda Octavia 4x4 support car is troubled by. Especially when you know that another puncture will bring disaster.

The nerves make for a slightly strained appreciation of the green bits that lie along the valley floors, a carpet of pastel-shaded life spreading like bacteria in the cracks of the world. Down there are all the myriad straight-backed, spruce-framed, strange little clapboard fortresses that the Norwegians call home. There aren’t many people about who aren’t smashing up bits of road, but those that are, stand stunned or wave happily at a light-blue Ferrari doing noisy fly-bys through villages more used to Land Cruisers and snowmobiles.

We take a ferry to skip one bit of fjord, the boat appearing from the mist with its bow split asunder like that amazing sub-swallowing prop from the James Bond film. There are three cars on it. Two of them ours. It feels like we’ve stumbled across a country that people are only just beginning to colonise. Somewhere harsh and beautiful, and weird as hell. But there’s something poetic about it, something that makes you want to write epic stories and tell tales in front of log fires. Something a bit legendary.

It takes another day and a bit to get to Aurland, near a town called Flåm (pronounced Flom), where the tunnel entrance begins. Too tired to go any further we check into a hotel that’s surprised at the passing trade, and wait for nightfall. To avoid the traffic, I’m hitting the tunnel in the wee small hours.

In the intervening time, while I’m here in my hotel room with a hour to kill, I thought I’d do a little bit of explaining. The Laerdal Tunnel itself isn’t just any old bit of pipe. This is an engineering marvel that bisects an entire mountain between Aurland and Laerdal, designed to connect Bergen and Oslo without the need to take ferries or climb over the top of a very scary mountain pass in the middle of winter. It measures 24.5km. That’s 15.2-miles in old money. Which, to put it into perspective for the modern petrolhead, is longer than a lap of the Nürburgring.

There’s just one problem. Driving through something like the Laerdal Tunnel obviously results in some peculiar psychological effects, not least of which is tunnel vision, literally. An uninterrupted 15-and-a-bit miles of tunnel would cause all sorts of problems for the brain – especially when it’s two-way, with no Armco in-between – not least people becoming hypnotised and crashing into each other. 

The challenge was to make the tunnel less boring. A team of psychologists at SINTEF (whose letters translate roughly into The Industrial and Technological Research Association), worked with the Norwegian Public Roads Administration to create a degree of variation through the tunnel that would prevent the drivers going through it becoming either ‘speed blind’ or from getting tunnel vision. So, to combat this, the clever tunnel builders built curves into the structure. Yup, they put corners in. They also put transmitters in so that your mobile phone works, 48 emergency lay-bys, 15 turning points, and blew out 2.5-million cubic metres of rock. This is a serious by-pass.

But there’s also the really good bit. They sub-divided the tunnel with four specially widened areas where trucks and buses could turn without reversing. Four 100ft by 60ft grottos when the rest of the tunnel can’t be more than 25-feet in diameter. Four huge stopping places lit with bright lights. Orange at waist height, fading to a neon blue at the ceiling, and highlighting a bare-rock cave look.

That’s one serious bit of amplifying tube, especially when your Ferrari has no roof. And those turning places are one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. They certainly get your attention. Imagine driving down the tunnel at 60mph, all the while approaching a 100-foot long, 60-foot wide pool of ice-blue and bright- orange madness on the horizon. It’s even more bizarre when you whip through it at speed.

It certainly wakes you up. And also highlights the fact that I can’t see any traffic in here, mainly because it’s 3am and all the sensible, normal people are tucked up in bed with the Norwegian equivalent of a Horlicks. We put the roof down in the first lay-by, and I’m struck by just how warm the tunnel is. I start to shake again. Excitement. Nerves. Then I pull gently out... 

And nail it. 

My ears explode, my brain caves in, the world just warps. Four-point-three litres of V8 seem to sense the occasion, suck in a big lungful and spit it out as hard as they possibly can, ejecting a sonic wall straight out from the four tailpipes. My head snaps back into the headrest as the rev counter shrieks past 7,500rpm. A millisecond and 500rpm later I twitch my right hand and second gear hits home, bringing with it one of the most glorious noises ever to grace our planet. There’s some petrol-powered epiphany that makes my eyes water and my senses melt. To my utter and everlasting shame I think I may have yelped “Yee-ha”. Jeez.

In first, I was just holding on, to be blunt. Dealing with a little wheelspin, making sure things are feeling right. In second and third I sat back and appreciated the kind of primal fear that I imagine Neanderthal man got from going bare-knuckle with a woolly mammoth. In a tunnel of this size and diameter, the noise has nowhere to go. It can’t dissipate, or be absorbed by furniture, the rock just fires it straight back at you. You can feel it. I guess it must be something like big wave surfing. You get propelled by something monstrous just inches behind you – you can’t see it, but my God, it’s there. Boiling the air about a foot from your back bumper.

We’re in ‘Race’ mode on the mannettino diff-switch for faster gear changes (it’s bone dry in here don’t forget), and the Ferrari seems to be enjoying itself. Finally in full voice after being nursed here on icy tracks and muddy roads; finally finding some grip, even though it means weaving in and out of the truck grooves in the road that the Ferrari track never seems to settle into comfortably.

When we stop, I can’t speak. All I can do is puff out my cheeks and blow air, shaking my head a little bit, wide-eyed. This does not happen often. Apparently, when Art Ed Norris heard us coming he broke out the video recorder to film us coming back into the grotto where we were taking the pictures. Three or four minutes later, he was still waiting. He could hear the Ferrari for what must have been 10 or 12 kilometres. Imagine what it was like being sat inside it. If I’m honest, I can still hear it now. The noise is etched into the grooves of my brain like an old bit of vinyl.

For one reason, I have to say the three-day drive was worth it for a 20-minute blast through a deserted Norwegian tunnel. All that effort and worry focused into the sharp memory of too much speed and too much reverberating fury in a too-small space. This was the coal of the trip compressed into the diamond of the final experience; sharp, bright, and damn hard.

At the end of the tunnel I turn around, look back down the gullet of the Laerdal and smile. Then I pull out, point the nose of the F430 into hell’s gateway and... reprise.