The combination of a thousand or so horsepower, wide scoop-style tires, and a driver who is hell-bent on telling gravity to go fly a kite make Icelandic Formula Offroad one of our favorite off-roading motorsport disciplines. The visual scale of what these drivers attempt to do with a beast of a custom-built off-road machine defies belief, and when you consider that a legit Formula Offroad race is treated more like a rally race, where there are several points of competition, like stages, instead of just a hill and an ambulance waiting for second place, it’s that much more impressive. But everything has to have a start, right? What drove a bunch of Icelanders to take Jeeps in more-or-less stock form, point them at the nearest hill, and give it hell?

Competition does strange things when humans are involved. If Joe can climb what was an impossible hill, then it must be possible, and I need to try. If Mike did it faster, then I need more power to match or beat him. That kind of logic spitballs into what we see today, with tube-frame creations wearing Jeep-ish bodies and rocking four-digit horsepower levels. It’s why the flights are higher, the crashes that much more brutal, and why rockbouncers in the States took to Formula Offroad like they had met a long-lost brother. Check out the story: