[carthick1000]

Thanks for sharing. You took us all through the ride up North and the narration was quite crisp and cohesive. Sitting with my morning cup of coffee and reading this while snowing outside in NL (Not at all normal in April) gives me quite some fond memories of driving my MX-5 up north. But me and my wife drove up north until Stockholm in deep winter in an MX-5. I can relate to how people reacted to us when we drove in all the rural roads of Sweden with a cabriolet in deep winter.

Your trip is far more adventurous than ours. Ours was with an MX-5 ND and as you mentioned with all reliable engine, heating and a cozy cabin. It takes certain level of guts to pull off what you guys did. I would love to do one such trip when the pandemic is over. Probably not in a rag-top spider but in an MX-5.

(Jeroen, Ik kan wel wat Nederlands verstaan en bedankt voor het pagina's vanuit de tijdschriften! Mooi verhaal!) Thanks for the pages from the magazine. There are some of us who read can and understand Dutch and a nice story!

Yours truly somewhere in rural Sweden and the next one in Stockholm:

[sentra26]

What an epic adventure. Thanks for sharing this. The farthest north I have been up is a few miles north of Fairbanks, AK. That was breathtaking for me and the sights have been etched on to my memory. I can only imagine what an adventure this should have been. Absolutely brilliant stuff.

[Dhillon]

Just amazing! What a lovely travelogue. Truly inspiring and making me wonder that there is so much to life than just chasing money and doing the grind. Thanks Joreon for this one. Subscribing to this to remind me of what one can do to make life memorable.

[SS-Traveller]

This was such an epic adventure!

Curious to know: Apart from the coolant that you've already talked about, what kind of lubricants were you using for the engine & transmission? What about the windshield washer fluid? What carburettor settings did you change? And did your friends swap back to the original tyres once back in Oslo, or continued back home on the spikes?

[handsofsteel]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

They just did not want to do the motorway journey across Sweden again.

Jeroen

Having driven for two years inside the Arctic circle (in and around Murmansk right upto the Barents Sea), I'd never want to do it again too. The novelty wears off and then harshness bites.
The most novel experience I had was a three hour drive on the White Sea - the sea was frozen upto a km thick (so we were told). Let me see if I can dig out some old photos

[Gannu_1]

And I thought driving to Ladakh was a big deal! Great trip you guys had and thank you for sharing the report with the community.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by SS-Traveller

Curious to know: Apart from the coolant that you've already talked about, what kind of lubricants were you using for the engine & transmission? What about the windshield washer fluid? What carburettor settings did you change? And did your friends swap back to the original tyres once back in Oslo, or continued back home on the spikes?

Not quite sure about the lubricants. I am pretty sure we did not do anything to the transmission or differential oil. We might have changed the engine oil. I have a few images, poor quality, where we are working on the cars in our friends garage. Looks like we are changing engine oil. And we did do a thorough inspection of the brakes, the electic wiring and so.

I can’t remember about the windshield washer fluid, but we probably just added a bit of strength by adding undiluted washer fluid. My experience with windshield washing system at low temperatures is not particularly good. Even on modern cars, they might still freeze over. The problem is that some of the components simply evaporate and that leaves what is left inside the nozzle prone to freezing.

No changes to the carburettors at all. Both Coda Tronca’s had carburettors and the Series 4 comes with a Bosch M-tronic system. Neither gave us any problems. They all started fine every morning. I seem to recall we did make sure we all had good batteries, but nothing else.

We did set off very cautiously every morning. Even thought the engines started fine, everything was still very very cold and it takes quite a bit of time for the oil in the engine, the transmission and the differential to warm up. On a Spider you literally sit on top of the gearbox, the gear handles goes straight into the box. Normally well insulated for sound by several rubber seals. But with these low temperatures we could hear the oil being pushed out from the gear teeth for the first 5-10 minutes. Not a big thing, you just need to go slowly at first. These 2.0 liter engines have, relatively, a large oil sump, some 7 liters, so it is a lot of oil that needs warming up!

As I mentioned, we did not use the cabin heater. It was no good and we wanted all the heat for the engine and the tranny. I think we even put some pieces of carbon in front of the radiotor, just to get it to heat up quicker.

Yes, the spikes were swapped once back in Oslo, so the cars drove home on their regular tyres again. The tyres were provided by Vredestein. In those days, still a 100% Dutch company and they sponsored this adventure by providing the spikes for all the cars and swapping them and keeping our old tyres stored for the week. The spikes did get mounted on all the cars original rims and balanced. Including the spare!

Jeroen

[Thad E Ginathom]

Fantastic story, Jeroen: what a wonderful experience!

Sign of the times, and of how life and expectations have changed, is the complete absence of GPS/internet navigation! I think it was just getting started, in an every-day sense, at that time. Of course, you could have plotted your position with a small-craft unit. Come to think of it, I had a Garmin brick, early than that, that had some sort of basic road-map display. I picked it up "cheap" in a London Chandlery sale, but seldom actually used it, as it was clumsy and unfriendly in every way!

[V.Narayan]

By jove! What a thread. I shall never grumble about Delhi's significantly milder winters. What latitude did you get to. I am pleasantly surprised that cars with low ground clearance did the job. Thank you for sharing your adventures.

[Hayek]

Incredible!!! That’s all I can say. Driving to the North Pole seems insane. Driving to the North Pole in an open top cabriolet is beyond insane. And in a classic car cabriolet - can’t think of words to express my sentiment about what you did.

Of course as someone from Bombay, I have never driven in snow. We did go beyond the Arctic Circle (to Utsjoki, Finland) in the winter of 2018 - but I resisted to temptation to self drive, and asked the tour operator to pick us up from the airport at Ivalo - and drive us to Utsjoki, as well as chauffeur us around for our Northern Lights hunting.

We didn’t go all the way to Tromso on this trip, but did go to a place called Tana in Norway for a husky ride, and then went to the Arctic Ocean.

Thanks a lot for posting and sharing this epic adventure with us.

[yogeshsom29]

Wow, this is epitome of Guts & Glory.

An absolute Thumbs up to the Top down ride. Thanks for sharing this inspirational stuff, each one of yearn for atleast 1 such trip in the lifetime to be told as tales to grandchildren.

[Satish Pari]

Amazing travelogue. Just loved the way you narrated the whole experience. Three classics going to the Artic circle is indeed amazing.

[shashanka]

An epic adventure/travelogue/photologue! I had read your posts in the forum now and then - but had no idea at the time that we had a real life Shackleton on our forum. Fabulous reading and viewing - Thanks once again.

[Jeroen]

Just a little update on our North Pole adventure!

A few months ago I got a note from one of our moderators. They had been approached by Andrew the editor of the Alfa Romeo Club for the Australian State Victoria.

He had stumbled on this TeamBHP article by chance. In Australia BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary) is a mining company founded in 1851 and one of the largest companies both in Australia and in the world, so you can imagine his initial confusion.

He asked if he could re publish the article in his club magazine, though a shortened version. Of course, I was delighted and so were my fellow North Pole companions! I mailed back and forth with Andrew for a while, also providing him with some of the original photographs and some I had not published.

A little while ago, the latest issue of their club magazine was published. On the cover, my very good friend and spanner mate Peter in his green 1980

Coda Tronca!


The article is a two page spread, very nicely done!



Was fun helping Andrew out, and it reminded all of us, of this fantastic journey once again.

Jeroen