Test Drive Experience in Lapland
Gentlemen’s Journal Checks Out the Beyond Adventure RS-6: A Test Drive Experience in Lapland
“We rally a mutant Porsche 911 through a frozen Finnish forest. All is going to plan until a cloud of white powder consumes my car
“Come on, push it – I want to see you push it. Find the limit!” comes a crackly, but insistent, voice over the radio. As I peer through the ice-framed windscreen, a gleaming white carpet lies before me, interspersed with patches of green pine trees shrouded in snow. Welcome to Lapland.
The narrow, winding track in front goes up and down, as though it were a bobsleigh run through Finland’s dense Arctic Forest. My car is a Kalmar RS-6, a modified 996 Porsche 911 wearing studded, ice-crushing Michelin tyres – the kind typically found on World Rally Championship cars.
With those words in my ears, I push harder into the next corner and the tail-happy Porsche predictably slides sideways, crunching over the ice as it claws for grip. All is going perfectly to plan until a cloud of white powder consumes my car, followed by a heart-stopping thud. I had, as instructed, successfully found my limit.”
Moments later, the same person who had urged me to push harder was standing by the car. “Very good – you almost had it,” he said with a smile, as he dusted off snow from the Porsche’s bodywork. Most owners of vintage 911s wouldn’t be encouraging people they’d just met to pile their cars sideways into a snow drift – but Jan Kalmar isn’t your average Porsche owner.
The founder and owner of both Kalmar Beyond Adventure and Kalmar Automotive, Kalmar has lived life to the max, both on – but mainly off – road. From the age of four, growing up in rural Denmark, he obsessed over machines, which eventually led him to get a job on a farm to earn money from the age of ten. “That’s really where my practical understanding of mechanical engineering came from,” says Kalmar, behind the wheel of his brightly liveried Porsche Cayenne SUV, which was fresh from a rough-and-ready expedition across the Sahara.
