It's a long way for a spin. Two intrepid men from Donegal, Andy Bassett and Keith Stevenson are back home after rallying in the far north of Finland, in the Lapland Artic rally.
Sadly, months of hard work and preparation came to disappointment when their Volkswagen Golf TDi car fell into a snow-covered ditch and they had to retire.
"Every day we learnt something new," says Keith Stevenson. "Our biggest worry was going out of the rally and being stranded at the side of the road in -34 degrees.
We carried special survival gear in the car, including firelighters. We were advised to start a fire as quickly as possible if we were stranded. Driving on hard-packed ice with spiked tyres was also a new experience for us.
Unfortunately as one of the few foreign entries we had a very low start number, which meant that the roads were extremely cut up by the time we arrived. We had to contend with hard gravel ruts with hard-packed ice.
"By the end of the first day we had picked up 23 positions. Over the first few stages on Saturday, further cars had retired due to accidents.
"We soldiered on, the Golf soaking up the punishment, when the inevitable happened. On a fast fourth gear right-hand bend, the car jumped out of the ruts and spun into a snow-covered ditch. We had shovels in the car, but the more we dug the further the car fell into the ditch so we eventually we had to accept retirement, even with the car undamaged."
They are both grateful to Donegal Town company S & R Motors, which prepared and shipped the showroom Golf TDi car to Finland.