Random Capture: Saabs and Snow
Saabs and Snow go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s a Swedish thing. They’re just designed to perform well in bad weather – which makes them pretty rugged road rally cars, if you so desire. Team D, an amateur rally team from the north, decided that an ’85 900 Turbo was the perfect choice for the Alcan Winter Rally. I’d have to agree.
For those unfamiliar, the Alcan Winter rally is basically a test of how huge your balls are. It covers 4,850 miles from Seattle, WA to Jasper, Alberta – which is pretty far north. It’s a ten-day event that tests reliability, common sense, and driver endurance. Of course, the 900 Turbo passed with flying colors. I particularly loved Team D’s caption for this shot – “I shot this while waiting for the WRX to be extricated from some deep snow…” is not something you hear every day!
Anyway, it makes me happy inside to see a C900 being used in motorsports; after all, Saab did have a massive rally presence back in it’s independent days. And how gnarly looking is this 900? TeamD’s got a few other cars (a pair of E30 325iX’s, as well as the aforementioned ’04 Subaru WRX) but obviously this ’85 8v Turbo is the coolest. And what a wonderful picture, to boot. You can catch them in the 2010 Alcan Summer Rally, which will probably be a whole lot easier.

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THE ALCAN!
There’s an event I’d love to try out. They run it twice a year, I believe (once in the spring and once in the fall) and I bet it would be an absolute blast. Ten days of cruising through snow, snow and more snow. I remember what it was like to start the car in the morning and let it warm up before rolling out. (Not so here in Arizona, where the coolant pretty much stays at operating temperature while parked.)
That’s a tough 900 right there. Love the strictly business vibe it’s giving off. Funny thing about the WRX being stuck in the snow. I have a friend who used his base model NEON rally car to pull an Audi Quattro out of a snow bank while ice racing some years ago out east.
The AlCan isn’t so much a high speed race as it is a TSD, right?
yeah brian, it’s a TSD road rally. It sounds completely epic.