Sven Assink’s Carbage run to his roots

Those of you who know Sven Assink, IT manager at FASoS, may have once or twice compared him to a Viking. But not to worry: this is entirely justified because Sven told me he is of Swedish decent.

What did strike me as a bit more odd was his hobby: participating in Carbage runs – 5000 kilometres rides through Scandinavia in a really old and really cheap car. I was of course eager to know more about this.

“The Carbage run is a five-day rally through Europe. There’s a summer edition and a winter edition. I don’t really feel like doing the summer version of the Carbage run because it’s not as extreme as the winter edition and thus not as much of a challenge to me. The idea of the Carbage run is that you take a car with a current market value of maximum €500, built before 1999. Then you pimp that ride and take it for a spin all the way to Sweden and Finland. There’s a huge organisation behind it and you need to draw a place because only 500 cars are allowed to participate in the race. I wasn’t chosen to participate for 6 or 7 years, and then I finally was chosen. February 2020, right before the corona pandemic hit, was the third time I participated.”

“The winter edition of the Carbage run is a five-day trip through Scandinavia. And not just over highways in mild weather. But through slippery roads in the middle of nowhere with 30 centimetres of snow. The first day is always easy and nothing spectacular. But then you reach Sweden and you can basically pinpoint the moment when the first snow sets in and the problems arise. Of course, you’re prepared and have spikes on your wheels and snow chains in your car to get through the snow, but you also know that something will happen. At times you need to dig your car out of the snow and one time our car even broke down.”

“The rule in the Carbage run is that if you see one of the fellow cars in the race is in trouble, you need to pull over and help that car out. So when our car broke down, one of the other cars pulled over and checked in with us. We found out that one tiny part of our car had broken down. And we really needed that part to be able to continue our journey, but we were in the middle of nowhere. So the contestants in the other car had to drive to a hardware store 100 kilometres from where we were to get that part, and drive 100 kilometres back to us so we could fix our car and continue our ride.”

“Luckily for them, you win the Carbage run not by getting to the finish line fastest, but by completing assignments that put you in weird positions. For example, you need to go to a Swedish family and ask them to drive on their snowmobile, photograph a moose, or lift a Swede on your back and carry him around. One of the contestants even managed to take a Swedish woman with them to the finish line,” Sven laughs.

Sven usually does the Carbage run with two friends and they take turns driving the car. “All contestants have to do a sobriety test every morning. Scandinavians are really firm when it comes to drinking and driving – rightly so of course – and the fines are pretty high when the police catch you. The same goes for imitating police cars: Scandinavians frown upon that. As you can see in the pictures, you pimp your ride for this race, and add all sorts of fun stuff to your car, such as horns and sirens. Now in the middle of nowhere no one will really be bothered if you turn on sirens once or twice for fun. But at some point last year we were stuck in a huge traffic jam in a tunnel. In my rearview mirror, I saw sirens and all cars behind us made room to let the car with the sirens through. I noticed immediately that this was not a police car or ambulance – it was one of the contestants in the Carbage run. Long story short, they made it to the end of the tunnel pretty fast and there they were met by the police and received a huge fine.”

Want to know more about Sven’s participation in the 2019 Carbage run? Check out this website!

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