Mark Higgins is not the first auto racer to bomb down Saint Moritz’s Olympia Bob Run. At the 1957 FIBT World Championships, a preternaturally talented, perilously reckless sporting polymath named Alfonso de Portago won a bronze medal in the two-man bobsled event, after having nearly nabbed third in the same event during the 1956 Winter Olympics at Cortina d’Ampezzo. Not long after his descent from Saint Moritz to Celerina on the icy track, in May 1957, the Spanish marquis entered his first Mille Miglia. He did not live to see the end of it.
Fourteen years after Portago’s death, Higgins was born on a verdant, motorsport-crazy rock in the Irish Sea. And though he now lives in Wales, perhaps his greatest international fame has come not through his rallying exploits, nor via his stunt work in James Bond films, but for his balls-out laps of the Snaefell Mountain Course on his native Isle of Man. Higgins and Subaru are taking at least a year off from the grand TT-related PR stunts, but when somebody had the wild-hair idea to drive a car down the Olympia Bob Run, Subaru dragged Higgins’s 2014 IoM record car out of storage. The company then sent it to Prodrive for a crash refit in an effort to help the largely stock STI withstand forces inherent in launching a car down a narrow ice canyon.
Said canyon is an anomaly in the world of bobsledding. Modern courses are built of concrete with built-in refrigeration to keep the racing surface frozen. The Olympia run, one of the earliest in the world, and heir to the original Swiss mountain path blazed by drunken Brits, is—by a quirk of grand European tradition—reconstructed every year by the same Italian family. As such, it differs slightly each season, making year-over-year course record keeping impossible. A win at Saint Moritz is prestigious, naturally, but like the course itself, it’s ephemeral, existing only in the context of a single winter. Construction begins in December, the track opens in early January, and the bobsled season ends at the beginning of March. Subaru, essentially, served as this year’s vanguard demolition crew, widening the track to handle the extra width of an automobile.
Unfortunately, a bridge over the course at Tree Corner meant that Higgins couldn’t make the full run to the finish line, leaving the corner named for Portago unreachable. The abutments were simply too closely spaced to fit the STI through. Instead, Higgins would pull out before Shamrock, owing to the spot’s location next to the road down the mountain, then turn around and drive back up.
Since the whole project took shape over a quick three months, and the largely stock 2014 Isle of Man record car already had a cage, Subaru settled on the old time-attack machine as a basis for its unconventional snowmobile. Prodrive had only to fit stiffer springs to handle the corner-entry load at Horse-Shoe, reinforce the corners of the car in anticipation of inevitable contact with ice walls, and install a muffler (Isle of Man officials had demanded a straight exhaust in the belief that loud pipes save lives). Crude nylon pucks bolted to a tubular-steel substructure under the front and rear fascias were designed to keep the bodywork intact. The 135-section-width studded tires rode on narrow 16-by-5.5-inch rims, leaving the blue Scoob looking a bit like it was sucking in its golden cheeks.
The night before we arrived, a bout of rain had turned much of the mountain to slush, putting the film crew a day behind schedule. The next morning found Higgins filming starts. After a brief tour of the car, we headed off to do the things one does in Saint Moritz, which mainly consist of a trolley/gondola ride up to the restaurant at the top of 10,030-foot Piz Nair, then shopping for the region’s famed native-built timepieces.
The next morning, we gathered at Horse-Shoe Bend, the centerpiece of the course. It’s a 180-degree right-hander that sees the side of the sleds parallel to the ground. The blue STI came blasting down the hill, pinballing its way down the chute, and blew a large section from the outside wall, chunks of which narrowly missed photographer Anthony Cullen. The tow driver arrived and pulled the car up and out of the bobsled run as articulated buses squeaked by the ridiculous scene of a crane lifting a car out of the track. Hope of a full run down was dashed, as it couldn’t be guaranteed that Higgins wouldn’t be thrown down onto the road below the course due to the weakness of the wall. Higgins posited, however, that he could get the car up to speed between the hole and the entrance to Horse-Shoe. Too slow and the car could lose grip and slide down the vertical surface. Much more and the Manxman and his Japanese steed would be pitched into the trees upon exiting the bend.
The trip through Horse-Shoe initially seemed almost uneventful. Higgins slowly cruised past the chunked section of the wall and rolled into the throttle, and the worked-over Impreza described a graceful arc across an icy vertical edifice. Then all hell, as is its wont, broke loose. Higgins lost a bit more speed than anticipated upon corner entry, forcing him to stay on the gas, widening his line. The car careened out of the bend on its side, the tungsten-tipped tire studs shredding the boards on the outside of the corner-exit wall like a crappy dado blade in the hands of the town drunk. For a moment, it looked as if the car might flip over the outside ledge and into the trees. Then, suddenly, the STI was back on its wheels, rolling to a stop at the makeshift track exit the crew had cut from the ice.
The driver’s-side daylight opening was surrounded by dents. The left front corner of the car, already ripped up by the hole-in-the-wall shunt, largely exposed the framework Prodrive had added to the front end. The nylon pucks were long gone, lost somewhere on the course. Michael McHale, Subaru of America’s director of corporate communications, handed over a shard of silver trim as a keepsake. Higgins, always ready with a calm, understated clip, referred to the ride on his side as “a proper rattle.”
“I think,” he added, “I’m gonna have a sore neck tomorrow.”
Then he got into his wounded car and drove back up the hill. We imagine Alfonso de Portago would have appreciated the bravado.
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