When the roads freeze, YouTube quickly buzzes with videos of vehicular mayhem as careless drivers ignore warning signs and common sense, becoming mere participants in zero-friction physics experiments as their cars slowly pirouette into one another. Clearly, icy roads and cars don't mix.
Unless your name is Juha Kankkunen, your car is a lightly modified BentleyContinental Supersports, and your road is a 10.2-mile long stretch of frozen Baltic Sea. Then, you set a world ice speed record of -- get this -- 205.48 mph.
How did Bentley do it? Well, first you start with the Bentley Continental Supersports, complete with its 6.0-liter V-12 putting out more than 600 horsepower to all four wheels. Add some Pirelli winter tires, a sturdy roll cage to the convertible body, a rear parachute, fill the tank with E85 ethanol just to make it all seem "green," and your car is ready to rumble.
Then, recruit Kankkunen, a man who knows driving on slick surfaces not because he's from Finland -- although that certainly helps -- but because he was World Rally Champion four times over and has numerous other accolades, including holding the world ice speed record.
Finally, you carve a track out of a stretch of frozen Baltic sea and invite along the Finnish Traffic Police and Guinness out to make sure you're not cheating the numbers.The resulting time is really nothing short of amazing when you think about it. Sure, cars have gone faster on deserts and salt. But this is ice people. Way slicker. Throw in crosswinds, snow flurries and maybe even a moose or two (this is Finland after all), and you have a pretty perilous record attempt.
Bentley will be celebrating its achievement with a limited-edition "extreme" version of the Continental Supersports, which it will unveil at the Geneva motor show on March 1. If you're one of the lucky 100 people to get one, just do us one favor: Don't try to break the record, okay?
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