Snowspeed

Norwegian friends build the world’s fastest snow sledge

It may look more like a Formula One car, but it’s actually designed for snow. And if everything goes well, it will be the world’s fastest.

The world record in gravity-powered snow sledge was set in 2014 when motorcyclist and tv personality Guy Martin achieved a speed of 134.36km/h.

Now, a group of Norwegian friends have set out to smash the record, targeting a speed of around 250 km/h.

- My childhood dream was always to have the best snow sledge in my neighbourhood. Now, we want to challenge the world of design when it comes to snow sledging. By mixing the Nordic tradition based on our snowy landscape with high tech, we will create a unique combination. We want to show that design is more than a nice lamp, says product designer Nima Shahinian to the local newspaper Romerikes Blad.

Shahinian and his friends and colleagues were recently invited to Toyota Motorsport in Cologne, Germany, where they tested a smaller model with Toyota’s advanced equipment, and in their wind tunnel.

Here, BBC visited and made this report:

The goal is to conduct the record attempt in January 2017. Shahinian writes on his Facebook account that the braking distance will be more than one kilometer. He also states that they probably have to go abroad to see it through.

They hope the process of building the sledge will give the designers valuable information, which they can further use for designing other things, like future models for cars.

Here you can see Guy Martin setting the current world record: