TG on ice: GT-R vs 911 Turbo vs Jag F-Type

Before I can drive, first I must walk. There's a standard posture here on the ice: arms out rigidly at 45°, knees slightly bent, feet shuffling parallel to the floor, as if possessed of ancient, badly lubricated hips. Freestyle it, and you'll end up horizontal, the kind of whip fall where the back of your head is the first thing to make contact with the floor. It does not make for stylish progress. But conditions dictate that we've all got to potter around like Gore-Tex-swaddled penguins, or end up with concussion. The thing is, usually, when driving on ‘ice', there's a crust of hard-packed snow: slippy, but with some degree of traction. Unfortunately, Kall recently had an unseasonable spell of hot weather - all of 8°C - and that brief warm-up, coupled with a lack of snowfall, means that the lake has settled into a footing resembling a giant sheet of oiled glass.

Pictures: Mark Fagelson

This feature was originally published in the April 2015 issue of Top Gear magazine

Which means it's not so much low-mu as no-mu. Parts of this expanse are clear enough to see straight through, even though the ice is some 60cm thick, and it's like staring off the edge of a cliff. Like someone had flipped the horizons in the vertical, squished the perspective around the equator and made the night sky upside down and underneath. It's magical.

Also bloody inconvenient, and embarrassing. I just tried to get out of the Nissan GT-R, slipped, and delivered myself to the ground in a boneless slither. With no chance of styling it out, I rear on hands and knees, and stare daggers at my guffawing colleagues, two of whom immediately fall over, apropos of nothing. Good. Seeing as legs don't work, I get back into the GT-R, working on the principle that you can't fall off a car.

Also, I might as well start with the cheapest car and work up. At which point, ‘cheap' is a relative term, given that I'm headed to the Nissan GT-R for just shy of £80 grand. Also ‘working up' is also a little light, seeing as every car in this little triumvirate has well in excess of 500bhp. But it's not at all about power in a place where 40bhp is probably excessive: this is about eking out the maximum from AWD, about grip and confidence. You don't win on ice through power. You win with delicacy.

Now, the GT-R is a Nissan winter experience car, meaning that it gains an ungainly metal chin spoiler to protect the radiator and prevent the airbags from explosively restyling the driver's hair if it nerfs a snowbank, but seeing as the GT-R is a bit of a pitbull of a thing in the first place, it's not exactly aesthetically fatal. It also has a set of Lappi rally tyres with short studs. This is a boon for practice. But seeing as we're not here to set lap times but work out which car has the most satisfying AWD system, we can work around the extra edge the GT-R has in terms of outright mechanical traction.

Now, the GT-R's bi-turbo V6 we're pretty familiar with, and nothing much has changed: 542bhp, 466lb ft and the capability on dry ground of hitting 62mph in under 3.0 seconds. But we're not on dry ground. In fact, we're not on ground at all. And that's where the GT-R's unique ATTESA ET-S all-wheel drive comes into play, an acronym that stands for Advanced Total Traction Engineering System for All-terrain with Electronic Torque Split. Try remembering that after half a bottle of wine.

Unique, because it's wilfully and rather wonderfully weird. Without getting too technical, it uses a rear-mounted transaxle in a car with a front-mid-mounted engine, with a separate secondary propeller shaft doling out drive back to the front wheels. Might sound a bit odd - but it helps balance the GT-R's weight distribution to 53:47 front to back.

What you get is a car with a 98 per cent rear bias under normal driving conditions, but with the capability of switching to 50:50 front-to-rear pretty much instantly. With the rear wheels operating through a mechanical limited-slip differential, the fronts are electronically monitored via four ABS sensors, a three-axis g-sensor, 'box and engine ECU mini-minds to flicker the brakes and mimic another diff for the front end.

Couple that to Nissan's VDC-R vehicle dynamics control systems, and you get variable torque vectoring across everything, making sure that each wheel with grip gets all the power it can handle. There's just one problem: with that many electronic conversations being had between you and what the wheels are actually doing, it's possible that the interaction between the driver and car might get a bit... muffled.

Nonsense. From the first corner, the GT-R is simply off-the-charts. Yes, it has an interior whose leather trim is largely styled on that of the inside of an old person's house slipper, and the cabin feels like an Eighties Atari compared with the Jag's and the 911's, but holy mother of Jesus Christmas, this thing is brilliant at slippy surfaces. The engine sounds effective rather than inspiring, a bit like an industrial space heater in a boxroom, and the gearbox feels less incisive than the Porsche's, but there's nothing, nothing more joyful than a GT-R on full boost on a marginal surface.

It's the car that requires the least amount of lock for any given situation: after the first corner, as long as you've tipped it hard enough, the GT-R will steer itself on the throttle in what are the longest four-wheel drifts I've ever achieved in a car. There's no sense that it is tidying up your inadequacies, just a feeling that, even when the surface is changing millisecond by millisecond, the GT-R is averaging out all the variables to give you the best chance of keeping control. Better still, you can play with it, edging the tail ever wider until you can literally enter a corner looking through the rear three-quarter window, and exit pointing in the right direction. And it's not all about those tyres, either. The GT-R has the application of every-wheel drive so sewn up that it masks its not-inconsiderable 1,740kg kerbweight so that it feels as light as the Porsche. If you want fast in every weather, the GT-R is palpably the most effective tool in the box.

A fact I become more convinced of when I step into the F-Type R AWD Coupe. Now, you'd be more used to thinking of the F-Type R as the incorrigibly lairy one that can't stay in a straight line, and with the same power as the GT-R sent exclusively through the rear wheels, it usually is. But this F is different. In normal driving, it's 100 per cent rear drive. But given rear-wheel slip, new systems controlling a separate clutch pack just behind the engine can divert up to 70 per cent of the available torque to the front wheels. And yet, under anything but extreme provocation, the Jag just feels like it's only pushing from the back. The steering is a bit too keen, even with an extra 80kg over the front wheels thanks to the additional hardware, and the tail scythes wide, much as you'd expect from the standard car. If you back off, you spin - but in backing off, you're not allowing the F-Type to show you its party piece. Which is to recover slides from the most ludicrous angles, thanks to the intervention of the front axle.

This is where you can see the difference between the GT-R and the Jag. The F will adopt a bum-out typical powerslide posture - 502lb ft of supercharged V8 making easy work of that - where the GT-R will be broadside with all four wheels pointing in the same direction. The GT-R feels more four-wheel drive, where the Jag feels like a rear-drive car up until much later, when the front end hooks up for pre-spin rescue duties. It's... interesting to compare them so baldly. The Jag feels like it's been set up to mitigate the frankly sometimes annoying excesses of the purely RWD version, there to partially tame its ferocious engine and delivery, and I think it does a fabulous job of the brief. I think on a real road, where you want it to still feel like a RWD, the Jag will do so - but it's a sports-car fail-safe, rather than a determined attempt at making this F-Type feel like it's driving all four. The F AWD, therefore, acts exactly like a RWD V8 on a damp road - boisterous, shouty and massive fun. But not - quite - as effective as the GT-R.

There's just one thing - in the silver colour we have here, slicked with sunny, unpolluted Swedish sunshine, the Jaguar F-Type looks and sounds incredible. And the interior is both effective and stylish. In fact, see it roar, cackle and spit through a corner, all four wheels throwing up dreamy rooster tails of sparkling spindrift, and you could be in a movie. Frozen: The Fast & Furious Years. It's beautiful.

The Porsche Turbo, on the other hand, isn't brutally engineering-ugly like the GT-R or pretty like the Jag. It's more familiar and less interesting. Just another 911. Handsome, though. And the interior is well-made, useful and ergonomic - all the things that Porsche is famous for. It's also got the whole all-wheel-drive thing nailed - and it sits somewhere between the four-square feeling of the GT-R and the tail-happy nature of the F-Type. It feels natural: amazing, really, seeing as though there's almost as much going on underneath as in the GT-R.

So. The Turbo basics: all-wheel drive with a Haldex-type hydraulic front diff, with PTM (Porsche Traction Management). PTV Plus (Porsche Torque Vectoring) yields an electronic rear diff that can lock from zero to 100 per cent, and there's stability management, active suspension, chassis control and active rear-steer. Oh, and active engine mounts.

What the science translates as is possibly the perfect combination of effectiveness and showing off that you could ever want. The Porsche is that car for making everything and everyone look like a professional ice driver. It doesn't require the aggression and commitment of the GT-R (less four-wheel drifting or transition-throwing here), yet it provides more all-wheel-drive feeling than the Jag. It's seamless: tip it into a corner - any corner - set the front and apply the power. The rear end will step out to about one full turn of lock, and as long as you keep a constant throttle, will just stay there, serene and calm as the arc is dispatched. The PDK is so slick that you can even change up during a slide, and the car remains balanced - again, it's a hefty piece of flattering engineering, this thing.

It feels light and precise next to the other two, the rear-engined configuration helping with the feeling of security. And I think if they were all on the same tyres, it might also be on par with the GT-R for sheer effectiveness. It's an interesting thing that this 911 Turbo feels slightly sanitised on the road, made as it is for habitual all-weather use, but stick it on a surface that really tests it, and the sheer brilliance of the transmission has a chance to shine.

Which leaves us with something of a quandary. For three cars with more than 500bhp, AWD and coupe bodystyling, they couldn't be more different. The Jag is still really a car committed to the feeling of rear-wheel drive, with an AWD set-up to allow you to play more safely. It looks the best - in my opinion - and without doubt sounds the most exciting. But, for ice, it's really not the ultimate toy. The Porsche 911 Turbo is the car that I would pick if money were no object - it's sophisticated, bombproof, easy and exciting all at once. It's just so comprehensive, so well judged and, when driven on a surface that exposes any and every aspect without doing 160mph, it gains all of that punchy and exciting character it lacks on the road. But it should for £120k+.

Which leaves me thinking that if I really wanted to get the most bang for my ice-driving buck, there is nothing in the same league as the Nissan GT-R. So it's a bit ugly, a tad middle-aged, sounds a bit boring, has a slightly plasticky interior and little of the class of the other two. But it has a drivetrain and ability that simply transcends all the criticism. It shows - by the end of the couple of days, the GT-R has the most miles on it. After one last session, I marvel once more at the GT-R, slide into the pits and know I've made the right choice. Then I step from it, and fall flat on my face. I should have stayed in the car.