Þorvaldur Einarsson

Þorvaldur Einarsson (born 7 October 1986 in Akureyri, Iceland) is an Icelandic racing driver, famous just as much for his bizarre path towards competing in F1RMGP as his actual performances on the track.

Early life (1986-2011)
Þorvaldur Einarsson was born at approximately 9:00 am on 7 October 1986, in Akureyri, northern Iceland. It was said he was one of the hairiest babies ever seen, even by Icelandic standards, as witnessed by a nurse who had been working the same maternity ward for 40 years. Þorvaldur's father, Einar Aðalbjarnarson, was a former national champion in Icelandic off-road racing and wanted a way to inspire and interest in motorsport in his two sons; however, the best he could do was to scrounge an old Scalextric set from a work colleague. His plan worked... sort of. Six-year-old Þorvaldur and his four-year-old brother, Guðmundur, would race each other round as many innovative tracks as could be fitted in their living room, only the brothers would diverge in interests as Guðmundur built up a collection of rally cars, while Þorvaldur preferred Formula One cars. Within a year he had managed to find a Renault RS01, March 2-4-0 (with the second set of rear wheels missing), Lotus 98T, Lotus 99T, Williams FW11 and Benetton B189.

This early experience with Scalextric slot racing prompted the young Þorvaldur to take an interest in Formula One racing for real, but with Icelandic TV coverage of the series almost non-existent, he would have to resort to obtaining VHS tapes of the highlights sent through the mail from a penpal in the UK. Aided and abetted by the English commentary from the legendary Murray Walker, Þorvaldur would come top of the class in English every single year from 1995 to 2001, and would liberally spray his conversation in the playground with such stock phrases as "And look at that!" and "Unless I'm very much mistaken...". Having first started watching F1 in the middle of the 1994 season, Þorvaldur would see first-hand the utterly rejectful exploits of Jean-Denis Délétraz, and vowed that day (at only eight years old) that he would one day be better than the hapless Swiss pay-driver.

Aged eleven, Þorvaldur's family moved to Hafnarfjörður, near Reykjavík, where his motorsport career moved from Scalextric racing to arcade machines - genuine racetracks being hard to come by in Iceland, even around the capital. Despite the concerns of his family that spending so much of his free time at the arcades would ruin his schoolwork, Þorvaldur managed to excel at all things academic - still consistently coming top of the class in English - while blitzing every racing game in existence. He was banned from one arcade for life after filling the top ten with unbeatable times on Virtua Racing, Sega Rally Championsip (always in the Lancia Delta Integrale), Daytona USA and Indy 500. But still, real motor racing eluded him... that was, until his father decided that he should experience real motorsport first hand, and took his son back to the mounds of black sand where he had forged his own career. Aged 16, and due in no uncertain terms to the constant aceing of Sega Rally Championship, Þorvaldur took to the treacherous slopes like a sharp axe to a missionary's skull, and once he had adjusted to being sideways or upside-down most of the time, romped to third place in the junior championship despite only joining midway through the season, and using his father's car that was as old as he was. The next year, he would win the junior championship with five meetings to spare.

University called, and Þorvaldur moved to the UK to study mechanical engineering at the University of Essex. Having passed the exceptionally tough Icelandic driving test before leaving, once settled in Colchester he bought his first car - a fifteen-year-old Vauxhall Nova, which broke down with frightening regularity and needed parts replacing on a weekly basis. So often did he have to visit his local scrapyard that he became good friends with the scrapyard owner, with whom he traded tales of his off-road championship exploits in Iceland - and soon scored himself a drive in a local banger racing series. Taken on board as the scrap man's team-mate and wingman, he took the main championship at the first attempt in a knackered Ford Granada. But his friendly scrap man was the one who was supposed to win, and they fell out soon afterwards. Þorvaldur was unmoved, and decided to make the step up into proper track racing. Conveniently invited to a university friend's birthday outing at an indoor kart track in early 2007, Þorvaldur was first to take to the track.. and was utterly hopeless. Precision driving had been all too easy on the arcade machines and damn near useless in the lava pits of Iceland and the banger racing tracks of Essex - but now it was an absolute necessity. Spurred on by the thought of a Délétraz-esque performance that he might never live down, Þorvaldur went back to the track on an almost weekly basis, taking an extra job serving beer to wasted Essex boys during the week and on Saturday evenings, and taking to the track on those Sundays where there wasn't a Grand Prix on. In 2009, he graduated from the University of Essex with a 2.2, having spent far too much time thinking about karting (and paying for it) to be too bothered with the pressing need to get some calculations done for his course, but on the other hand, he was now the fastest driver at the local kart track and was very pleased about it.

Þorvaldur returned to his native Iceland for the summer, before accepting a job at an engineering firm in Oslo who design and build high-tech transmission systems for snowmobiles. Amongst his job descriptions was "test driver", sometimes involving trips north of Lillehammer to drive experimental snowmobiles very fast until they break. He managed to couple this with regular visits to Rudskogen Motorsenter, Norway's only permanent motor racing circuit, where he was occasionally employed as a part-time kart driving instructor. On 27 August 2011, former F1 driver Stefan Johansson came calling, looking for Scandinavian talent to drive for an all-new and all-Nordic team in the F1RMGP series, which would eventually take the place vacated by an ethereal Ferrari squad; amongst his notes from Head Team Principal, Odin, it said "find an Icelandic driver if possible, as there's been a promise of huge sponsorship from Vífilfell..."

2012
Þorvaldur's debut season in F1RMGP started slowly, with some inconsistent performances in qualifying at the beginning, which would translate to steady finishes in the minor points. Qualifying 17th for his first race in Phoenix, he climbed the field to finish seventh, which was repeated at Interlagos, but from eighth on the grid. Fourth in qualifying at Imola could only translate to an eighth place finish, but with team-mate Jan Magnussen taking pole and finishing third, Viking Racing's initial teething troubles had been ironed out. Failing to deal with the demands of the tricky streets of Monaco, and with the blocking tactics of Olivier Grouillard, Þorvaldur qualified 23rd, his worst grid slot of the year, but recovered to ninth. Managing only tenth in Canada, a race won by Magnussen, caused a few critics to crawl out of the woodwork. Incensed that rookies with far less in the results column than five points finishes out of five had escaped similar treatment, Þorvaldur put his in-built berserker rage to fine use at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. Qualifying second behind Magnussen, he beat his team-mate to the first corner and never looked back to take his first win, as well as escaping the realms of the reject for all time; he celebrated in fine style with a flagon of team boss Odin's favourite mead, and inspired one journalist to write a review of the race in the style of the Hávamál. He was (slightly) brought down to Earth at Magny-Cours, getting his beard trapped in the gearchange paddles during his last qualifying lap and so taking only 18th on the grid, but recovered to a fifth place finish. Supercharger problems at Silverstone limited him to 13th on the grid, but the Viking mechanics fixed the car for the Saturday afternoon and he stormed through the traffic to take second ahead of his team-mate and behind fellow 2012 debutant Chris Dagnall, and also found time to give Olivier Grouillard a bit of payback for him Monaco antics. The result propelled Þorvaldur to third in the championship, his highest point of the season, and so close was the race behind Magnussen and HWNSNBM that he'd been eighth before the race started, and eleventh after Canada.

The race at Hockenheim followed a similar pattern; the Vikings were strangely off the pace in qualifying, Þorvaldur managing only 12th with Magnussen not much futher forwards, but in the race the Silverstone result was repeated, Þorvaldur second, Magnussen third, with HWNSNBM on the top step this time. Hungary threw up a bizarre race weekend, the one which saw Stefan Grand Prix appear on the grid for the first time while Jean-Denis Délétraz DNQed with the slowest time of all; in a race that saw Pedro Diniz take a first victory for Forti, Þorvaldur had an uncharacteristic off-day (as did HWNSNBM) and finished 13th. It would be his only finish of the entire season outside the points, as he picked himself up for the challenge of Spa-Francorchamps, qualified third with Magnussen on pole, but as it failed to rain on race day, the Vikings faded slightly, and Þorvaldur finished seventh just behind his team-mate. His second true moment of glory would come on the Friday afternoon at Monza, though, where he edged out Magnussen to take his first ever pole position in F1RMGP. Why he only managed ninth in the race is a mystery to this day, but he was quite aggressively barged out the way (as was everyone else) by a charging Michael Andretti, desperate to prove a lot of points after his pride was catastrophically damaged by an embarrassing DNQ at Spa.

Again outqualifying his more experienced team-mate at Estoril, Þorvaldur took the fight to eventual winner Chris Dagnall for the first half of the race, and would eventually join the Scunny Scouser on the podium, finishing third. Fourth in Spain after a hateful qualifying that saw him line up only 14th on the grid was an excellent recovery on a weekend where Magnussen and the Viking team in general were off-colour. For the final two fly-away races, Þorvaldur qualified in the top ten - sixth at the challenging Suzuka, and tenth on the Adelaide street circuit, translating both into points finishes, eighth and sixth respectively. The result in Japan saw him officially bow out of the title race, leaving it just to HWNSNBM and Magnussen for the title showdown, but it also secured Viking Racing the Constructors' Championship in their debut season, which was celebrated boisterously in a way that only Vikings can. Þorvaldur would finish fifth in the Drivers' Championship, and was the only driver to see the chequered flag in all sixteen races - everyone else on the grid had either had at least one retirement or at least one DNQ (which Délétraz, Dagnall and Grrrrjjjjnnn all succumbed to even in front-running cars). He was immediately signed again for the 2013 season.

2013
With Viking Racing promoted to the number one garage, with a car now bearing number 3 instead of 28 and the whole team fuelled by vast quantities of Swedish mayonnaise, the Vikings were right on the pace from the start. At Phoenix, no sooner had the MJØLNER-02 been unveiled than it was fastest; Þorvaldur qualified second behind Magnussen, and finished there - he might have won if not for some inspired pit strategy from Forti that saw Luca Badoer come out on top for his first win. Some shuffling in the calendar meant that the next visit was to Mexico, which Þorvaldur confirmed as his favourite circuit by qualifying third behind Chris Dagnall and Toleman's new recruit, Allan McNish - he jumped them at the start and was unstoppable, taking his second F1RMGP win in fine style. For the first time ever, he led the championship, six points ahead of Badoer. Another third place on the grid at Interlagos did not translate to the expected result - seventh, after a troubled race in ridiculously wet conditions, but his lead in the championship was still intact. Sixth on the grid at Imola translated to a fine third place in the race - but with Dagnall winning, it was the Scouser who was propelled to the head of the Drivers' Championship. Monaco was a low point, though; qualifying fifth was no problem, but disaster struck on the 37th lap of the race; Þorvaldur would suffer his first ever retirement, at his 21st race, when his gearbox demolished itself suddenly and inexplicably. No points and a second place for team-mate Magnussen meant he was back to third in the Drivers' Championship. The teams flew out to Canada for the race at the car-breaking Île de Notre Dame circuit, where Þorvaldur proved his new gearbox was well and truly up to the job, taking pole position by just under four tenths from Chris Dagnall. However, a wet race where the Vikings were called onto slicks far too early allowed Dagnall to take the win and Þorvaldur cold only manage fourth - annoyingly, a lap down. Back in Europe, Magny-Cours looked likely to be a frustrating event after Friday's qualifying session, Þorvaldur lining up only tenth, with team-mate Magnussen sharing the front row with a charging Luca Badoer who had taken pole. The race, though, turned into something of a Viking benefit gig, as both cars showed red-hot pace, Magnussen winning the race and Þorvaldur taking a clear second for the team's first ever one-two. Qualifying at Silverstone was better, as Þorvaldur fond top form to take pole by three tenths; unfortunately, in the race, the errant Taki Inoue intervened. Moving aside to be lapped, Inoue moved too far, slid off the road, into the wall on the pit straight, bounced off it and rammed into the side of Þorvaldur's car, destroying the front wing and one front tyre. Limping back to the pits to have both replaced, Þorvaldur was able to rejoin the race, but finished a lowly 17th, one lap down, but it would have been two had Jan Magnussen not courteously let him unlap himself once. Despite this setback, Þorvaldur was still in a solid third place in the Drivers' Championship at the half way point.

At Hockenheim, fifth in qualifying was translated into a steady fourth, behind Magnussen, on a day where the Fortis blitzed the field and Andrea Montermini took his first win; it was enough to crack 100 points for the season. Second on the grid at the Hungaroring behind Chris Dagnall was no bad thing, and neither was second in the race - but this time it was behind another surprise winner, Yuji Ide. Then came Belgium. In the thick Ardennes forest, the type not seen in Iceland since the first settlers arrived over a millennium ago, Þorvaldur beat the entire field to a pulp in qualifying, only he and Luca Badoer breaking the magic two minute mark at the Spa circuit, and on race day, he was first round La Source and it was Goodnight Vienna for everyone else, Þorvaldur winning the race by almost a minute. That was enough to retake second place in the Drivers' Championship, and was followed up with pole position at Monza. However, someone hadn't read the script; despite scrapping with team-mate Magnussen and the ever-present Chris Dagnall for most of the race, on lap 51, the fuel system of the Koenigsegg engine finally screamed enough, spat fuel all over the hot exhaust manifold, and the car burst into flames, making a spectacular inferno all the way from Parabolica to the finish line. Great viewing for the crowd, but no points for Þorvaldur. Amazingly unscathed, he proved his toasting at Monza had no lasting ill-effects, putting the car on the front row at Estoril, behind local idol Pedro Chaves who had put in a heroic performance on the Friday. The race was a frustrating one, the after-effects of Monza manifesting themselves in some unexplained supercharger problems, which halted Þorvaldur's progress to a lapped seventh. Still lying third in the Drivers' Championship and with a definite chance of the title, the final race of the European season at Barcelona saw Þorvaldur take his fifth pole position of the year, but the race itself saw a bizarre photo finish between the two Vikings; a charge to the line saw them separated by one thousandth of a second, with Þorvaldur judged to be in front, hence taking three points off Magnussen's potential total; but with F1RM refusing to issue team orders, Jean-Denis Délétraz won the race ahead of Chris Dagnall, hence Dagnall was seven points down on what many say he should have been. Délétraz had, after all, been out of title contention since Monza. Qualifying at Suzuka, the penultimate race of the season, saw Þorvaldur take a subdued 13th place on the grid. Recovering in the race to seventh was not enough to keep his championship challenge alive, though; Chris Dagnall took sixth, Magnussen a mere ninth, and that ensured Dagnall led Magnussen by eight points and Þorvaldur by an unassailable 30 going into the last race.

Þorvaldur's job at Adelaide was to help Magnussen win the title, however tricky that may have been, but both Vikings underperformed in qualifying. Magnussen fifth and Þorvaldur eighth, with Dagnall on pole, wasn't in the Vikings' script. But after Dagnall had held the lead for 19 laps, Magnussen surged past in an insanely brave move and had done everything he needed to do. Þorvaldur's job was to get past Délétraz who was using every trick in his blocking book to stay ahead, and it took until lap 56 to dispatch both him and Pedro Chaves, to take third place. A minute behind Dagnall, Þorvaldur knew that if he could dislodge Dagnall from second place, with Magnussen winning, the title would go to the Dane. For lap after lap he carved chunks of a second or more out of Dagnall's lead, even though the prospect of actually overtaking was a slim one; nevertheless, the intention was to see if the Scouser would crack under the pressure. He didn't. Magnussen won the race, Þorvaldur had cut the gap to 17 seconds at the end, but Dagnall held onto second place, and took the title by one point. Viking Racing were miles ahead in the Constructors' Championship so there was something to celebrate at the end, but it would be Dagnall, not Magnussen, with the prized number 1 on his car next season. Þorvaldur's story in 2013 was of a driver who had improved from his rookie season to take five pole positions, two wins, and had held the Drivers' Championship lead early on in the season, staying in contention until the fifteenth race. To improve from here would mean beating either the new Drivers' Champion or his team-mate. Maybe both.

2014
The 2014 season looked particularly hopeful as Þorvaldur headed the timesheets at two of the six pre-season testing sessions, with the usual suspects - Magnussen, Dagnall, Ide and Badoer all there or there abouts alongside him, and new challenges coming from the new Leyton House Suzuki Works Team, with Hideki Noda and Life refugee Bruno Giacomelli also occasionally in the mix. Unfortunately for the others, Þorvaldur monstered the opening flyaway rounds, taking pole and the win at both Interlagos, and his favourite race at Mexico City, having now won there at all three attempts. Second on the grid in Canada, moved to the third round, saw both pole and the win go to Yuji Ide, but Þorvaldur was second, both on the grid and in the race, leaving him with a 31-point advantage over Ide by the time the teams returned to Europe; the deficit of the other competitors was exacerbated by an unsatisfactory start for all of them. Magnussen returned to form at Imola, beating Þorvaldur for pole, but the Icelander did not take that lying down and reversed the situation in the race for his third win of the season, his cause being helped by a very slow Allan McNish doing a hatchet job on Magnussen. The championship lead stretched to 46 points, still ahead of Yuji Ide, and those initial three wins also saw Þorvaldur take the early-season Apertura championship, which had previously been won in the past two seasons by the driver who would go on to take the Drivers' Championship.

The next two races, at Monaco and the "flag of convenience" Andorran Grand Prix at Barcelona, were rather more of a disappointment; second place on the grid around the streets of the principality converted to no points as his suspension failed catastrophically ten laps from the end of the race, whereas Barcelona was all-round disppointing, only sixth on the grid became another retirement due to supercharger failure - not something that had ever happened in the two years of the Koenigsegg engine. Jan Magnussen won in Monaco and Chris Dagnall in the underpowered PURE-engined F1RM to improve their championship positions; Þorvaldur now led Magnussen by only 19 points. It was alleged by an Icelandic newspaper that the supercharger on Þorvaldur's car had been tampered with by the Spyker team duting one of their "after-qualifying parties", but nobody could prove anything. The supercharger was replaced, although Þorvaldur's luck wasn't totally restored - he took his third pole of the season at Magny-Cours, but could only convert that to sixth in the race after three separate altercations with incautious backmarkers Kazuki Nakajima and Olivier Beretta, and a badly-judged block for position by Ralph Firman. Still, that gave him over 100 points for the season, and increased his championship lead to 26 points after another hideous afternoon for Jan Magnussen. Somewhat subdued at Silverstone, Þorvaldur took only ninth place on the grid in a damp qualifying session, which improved at least to another sixth place, on a day that Bruno Giacomelli took his and Leyton House's first F1RMGP win. Giacomelli was now his closest challenger at the half-way point of the season, having quietly picked up decent points and one podium along the way while others failed to live up to their own high standards; the lead was 28 points, with Ide third in the championship and Magnussen fourth. The Dane, however, showed that he was far from out of contention at the inaugural Grand Reversal, in which the teams swapped drivers with those at the opposite end of the grid; the Viking drivers found themselves saddled with the hopeless David Price DPR-1 for the race, which Magnussen dealt with rather better, taking the slowest car on the grid to an amazing fourth as Þorvaldur ended up a lap down in sixteenth place in the sister car. Fortunately for Þorvaldur, his own car was driven by the devoid-of-talent Christophe Hurni, ending up last on the timesheets for a DNQ that the Viking mechanics were relieved to see.

Back to the regular action and back to the script in Germany, as Þorvaldur had spent the mid-season break back at Rudskogen, coaching the next generation of drivers, and his form immediately returned; pole position on Friday was duly converted to to the win on Saturday, ahead of Yuji Ide, as Magnussen floundered again and crashed, taking the first-ever Reject Of The Race for a Viking. Magnussen responsed with pole and a dominant win at Spa-Francorchamps, though Þorvaldur hung in there for fourth to reduce the damage to his championship lead. Magnussen took another pole at the Hungaroring to further throw down the gauntlet to his younger team-mate, but nobody could have predicted the berserk result; both Vikings would retire, as would both Super Aguris; both Leyton Houses were low down in the points and the nearest championship challenger was Chris Dagnall, taking fourth; Þorvaldur's engine had blown with six laps to go, leaving the race to be won by Marko Asmer, barely believing his luck. Hence, nobody near the top of the table could take advantage of Þorvaldur's misfortune - and neither could anyone else at Monza, where he only took fourth on the grid with Ide and the two Fortis looking particularly strong, but in the end he won the race, Ide having spun off early, the Fortis and Magnussen having been blown into the weeds, and Hideki Noda having lost the lead on the last lap with a spent turbo. Such had been the up-and-down fate of many of the drivers that with four races to go and 100 points to be won, Þorvaldur could have wrapped it up by now, or his 61-point lead could have been a lot less. Seven drivers were still in mathematical contention.

The fact that the job wasn't done yet was thrust brutally into the limelight at Estoril, as Þorvaldur's canter to victory was stopped dead in its tracks by a careless Volker Weidler. Still, Magnussen did not take full advantage, spinning twice on his way to fourth, while Noda won his first race and Ide took second to keep his interest in the title alive. The Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez looked to be a potential disappointment, Þorvaldur lining up sixth - but Magnussen was eighth, and with a 49-point difference between them, for Þorvaldur to score even one point more would hand him the title. In the end, the Dane could not quite muster enough speed, on a day that hardly belonged to the Vikings; he hauled himself up to sixth, but Þorvaldur held him off for fifth - securing him the Drivers' Championship. 51 points ahead he was with 50 left to be won, that was the end of it; he was invited onto the podium, where he was personally presented with the Carel Godin de Beaufort Cup by Carel Godin de Beaufort himself, Sir Bernard Shekelslike having used the Hologram Projection Unit's spare driver capacity to allow for that presentation. It is said that everyone in the Viking Racing team celebrated after the race - except for Jan Magnussen, who had now lost three straight titles after being the favourite for two of them at least.

The final two races in Japan and Australia would decide the Constructors' Championship; the Japanese race, in which the entire Pacific Ocean cascaded down from the sky, was won from pole by Jan Magnussen, desperate to prove something to himself after the championship defeat; even so, Þorvaldur ran him very close in qualifying and the race to take second both times, winning the Willi Kauhsen Cup for the Vikings. The final race in Australia was also wet, but not a Viking benefit gig; Þorvaldur targeted a podium to finish his championship season in fine style, but it was not to be as electrical gremlins due to the wet weather sidelined him and he was classified sixth.

Þorvaldur basked in the glory of his championship win, and nobody could say he didn't deserve to; he'd taken the championship lead at the first round and never lost it, winning five races in the season, more than anyone else. He immediately swore an oath of loyalty to the Viking Racing team.

Complete F1RMGP results
Bold text indicates pole position. F1RMGP does not keep a record of fastest laps.

Personal life
Þorvaldur's Norwegian girlfriend, Sigrid, is a fully Unix-literate IT professional, and alternative model who has been known to design, make and creatively destroy her own clothes. They met at the Inferno Festival in 2010.

Far from the musical preferences of many other F1 drivers (Mika Häkkinen, this means you, I mean... Celine Dion? Seriously?) Þorvaldur mentions Amorphis, Falkenbach, Bathory, Skálmöld and particularly Moonsorrow as his favourites. Asked for his opinion on Iceland's most notorious musical export, Björk, he would not be pressed for an answer and his silence (and contorted facial expression) said everything that needed to be said. An accomplished musician himself, he is working on a one-man solo project (in a manner similar to Windrider), alleged to be known as Grjótagjá, and is "inspired by the crisp air of an Icelandic winter, the effort spent and the hardships endured by my ancestors to colonise this barren lump of rock in the first place, and the smell of unburnt petrol from the exhaust of a victorious Viking Racing car." He is hoping to persuade Damon Hill, Eddie Jordan and Adrian Sutil to perform guest appearances on guitar, drums and keyboards respectively on the first Grjótagjá album. Even though it has not even been written yet, it is already more popular than Jacques Villeneuve's Private Paradise, and the lack of any original material from Grjótagjá did not stop Þorvaldur putting together a live line-up to perform a set of his favourite cover versions at the ''F1RMGP Rocks! Unlike Bahrain, Which Doesn't'' event at the 2014 Bathurst Enduro.

Þorvaldur's favourite food is said to be hákarl, which is difficult to obtain outside Iceland, but he is also partial to surströmming, lutefisk, reindeer steak and moose kebab. He has also been immortalised in modern Icelandic folklore for being able to shovel truly frightening quantities of skyr, Iceland's most famous dairy product that has long been popular amongst legendary strength athletes such as the late Jón Páll Sigmarsson and Magnús Ver Magnússon. "If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me!"