JAN WITH A PLAN

This man thinks he can storm the chockers restomod Porsche scene with Scandinavia’s answer to Singer. Is he mad? Well, a bit. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong

- OLLIE KEW

“WHY DOES A DOG LICK HIS OWN BALLS?” Jan Kalmar’s retort catches me off guard. Um, because it can? “Exactly.”

His metaphorical answer to me querying why his prototype ‘RS-R’ 911 rally restomod has leather wrapped impact bars beneath its bumpers is typical of the forthright Dane. As is the geeky follow-up.

“Actually to get the correct curve the metal needed a lot of welds which did not look so nice, so we covered the bars in this stitched leather.”

Kalmar is a car enthusiast, a businessman, and according to Tom Kristensen – the nine-time Le Mans winning co-owner of his burgeoning car firm – “a nerd”. He’s also a handy driver. A record holder for the 11,000-mile Nordkapp to Cape Agulhas (tip of Norway to bottom of South Africa) rally, he invites me into a modified Porsche Cayenne ‘CS-R’ to offer a tour of his ice driving paradise in Lapland, 110 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

“F**k’s sake.” He’s irritated someone left the traction control on. Banished with a button prod, he shows me around through the side window. One hand on the wheel, the other pointing out eight miles of tracks on 272 acres of swamp.

There are 30 circuit combinations. Every night 10 water trucks brimmed with 40,000 litres wet the surfaces, freezing hard overnight to repair the scars left by the studded tyres on his fleet of veteran Porsches. “We use a billion litres of water each season” he notes, mid-drift. By not depending on frozen lakes as a surface, Kalmar’s Spirit of Speed days run even during a mild month when lake ice would be too thin, and his tracks feature challenging gradients and slopes that obviously aren’t possible on a lake.