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 t...