HIGH N MIGHTY

AFTER SCALING A MOUNTAIN OF HOT HATCH RIVALS HYUNDAI’S i30 N SIZES UP AUSTRIA’S HIGHEST PAVED ROAD

- LOUIS CORDONY 

THE DRIVE THROUGH ITALY that delivers you at the foot of Austria’s highest road is nothing like a sweaty trek across the desert. But just as you’d curse a sand storm that shrouds the Giza pyramids just when you arrive, the fog lurking behind the Grossglockner High Alpine Road’s southern toll gate has tinged us with the same disappointment.

We’re here on the north-west tip of Carinthia, in Austria’s south, ready to rip up supposedly one of Europe’s greatest driving roads. A glance at its website hints this should stack up as a wonder of the driving world. Its 48km of twisting tarmac looks so smooth, petrol heads might think they have died and gone to heaven, while at its highest point you’re actually already 2504m of the way there. But it’s the 36 hairpins littered on either side, connected through sweeping bends and dog-leg corners that should convince us it’s worth delaying the afterlife.

That might prove challenging today, though, since the autumn air has laid a thick layer of fog on a road dampened by a night’s rain. We’ve arrived a couple months before the roads close in late October (and long before Covid-19 was a glint in Bill Gates’ eye) which, judging by the lack of anyone else at the toll gate, is a good way to have the road to ourselves. Our snapper Tomo says the weather was perfect a week ago on a recce, proving you could roll the dice and wait for clear skies, but since my flight out of Munich is booked tomorrow it’s now or never.