{"id":2166942,"date":"2026-09-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2166942"},"modified":"2026-09-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T21:00:00","slug":"meet-the-explorer-who-drove-his-rimac-nevera-1391-miles-for-a-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2166942","title":{"rendered":"Meet the explorer who drove his Rimac Nevera 1,391-miles for a service"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 2031 NASA and SpaceX will deorbit the International Space Station. A rocket will dock and put the brakes on the 17,500mph village in the heavens, sending it on a fiery one way trip down to Earth. Most of it will burn up on re-entry, but some 40 tonnes is expected to make it through the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

As two thirds of the world\u2019s surface is water, it\u2019d be unlucky to land in your high street, but the space boffins aren\u2019t taking any chances. They\u2019re aiming the wreckage at Point Nemo, the furthest part of the Pacific Ocean from any land. It\u2019s one of the remotest places on Earth, a so-called \u2018pole of inaccessibility\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Except, Chris Brown has been there. In fact he\u2019s the first recorded human to swim on Earth\u2019s loneliest spot. Chris has also visited seven of the eight official \u2018poles of inaccessibility\u2019, and aims to become the first person to complete the set. But naturally Top Gear is meeting him to talk about his 1,888bhp electric car service.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cLast year Mate Rimac sent out a letter to all Rimac owners,\u201d he explains in his quietly spoken Yorkshire accent. \u201cIt said \u2018you\u2019re always welcome out to the Rimac Campus, treat it like home\u2019. Usual corporate stuff. In fact he said, \u2018have you ever thought about driving out to Zagreb in the car?\u2019 He wanted somebody to take one on a long journey…\u201d<\/p>\n

Noting rapid charger locations, Chris calculated a route from his home near Harrogate to Rimac HQ in western Croatia, but naturally, he wasn\u2019t going to go direct. \u201cInstead of just driving to the Campus, I thought I\u2019d drive all the way down to the Dalmatian Coast and make it something enjoyable. And on the way, throw in a couple of expedition points.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After excelling in physics led to a career in the oil industry, Chris is now a successful tech entrepreneur. By \u2018successful\u2019, I mean besides his Range Rover<\/a> daily driver and Rimac Nevera<\/a> hypercar he\u2019s got a manual Aston Martin V12 Vantage<\/a>, and a Lamborghini Revuelto<\/a> he\u2019s nonplussed by.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like cars which are comfortable as well as fast. After two hours in the Revuelto I\u2019m having to stuff a pillow down my back. It\u2019s just not a great experience to drive. The Rimac has ruined my experience of the Revuelto because it\u2019s faster and<\/em> more comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

But collecting cars is less important to Chris than collecting poles of \u2013 and now points of \u2013 inaccessibility, he explains over a light geography refresher.<\/p>\n


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\u201cEveryone\u2019s heard of the planet\u2019s North Pole and South Pole, but in geographic terms from years gone explorers coined \u2018poles of inaccessibility\u2019. They\u2019re on the continents. They\u2019re not strictly \u2018poles\u2019, as a pole is a point around which an object can rotate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pole of inaccessibility for say, Africa is a point in Africa furthest from the ocean in any direction, same in Australia, and so on. I got to thinking you could have one for the UK because it\u2019s an island: locate a place that\u2019s furthest from the ocean in Britain. You could do it for a country like France \u2013 the point furthest from any French border. I call these \u2018points of inaccessibility\u2019, and as a sort of sub-task, whilst I\u2019m still trying to do all of the poles, I\u2019m just accumulating points.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hence the wiggly 1,391-mile route to Zagreb: Chris was picking up more \u2018points\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great fun thing to do with cars because cars give you such easy mobility. You can\u2019t just go hiring helicopters willy-nilly. Take the one in Spain. It\u2019s in this gorgeous Sierra. You could drive to it, you could cycle or hike to it I suppose, but by driving you see stuff and meet people that you just wouldn\u2019t normally see when you\u2019re visiting a country.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It dawns on me this is a free of charge method to turn roadtrips into a sort of quest game. And if you find yourself passing Church Flatts Farm just southeast of Coton in the Elms, Derbyshire, congratulations. You\u2019re 70 miles in any direction from the coast and have officially reached Britain\u2019s point of inaccessibility. Slightly easier than Australia\u2019s Red Centre, or swimming out to a spacejunk bullseye.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy going to these points, you discover a lot more about a country, its culture and its people than just, say, going to the Eiffel Tower and Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es and saying you\u2019ve visited France,\u201d reasons Chris. \u201cA lot of tourists gravitate to the landmarks: the tallest, the biggest, the most famous, but miss discovering the bits in-between.\u201d<\/p>\n

On his Rimac servicing jaunt, he ticked off points of inaccessibility for Belgium and Luxembourg. \u201cI like to use the latest technology available to me \u2013 ChatGPT planned that route.\u201d So you needn\u2019t be a loaded hypercar stabler to give it a go yourself.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s from the Galactic program that I was invited to go to the South Pole with Buzz Aldrin<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Exploring is perhaps the oldest innate human trait, but I ask Chris where his penchant for seeking out these remote and random locations first came from. \u201cThe biggest influence on my life was watching the Moon landings with my dad on our black and white TV. That got me interested in science. I then went on to university to study physics \u2013 mostly nuclear physics, which led me into engineering.<\/p>\n

“My business grew and I could afford to go on the Virgin Galactic [space tourism] program. It\u2019s from the Galactic program that I was invited to go to the South Pole with Buzz Aldrin.\u201d<\/p>\n

As location and name drop anecdotes go, it\u2019s a good one. \u201cBuzz wanted to be the oldest person to go to the South Pole and they had two spare spots, which were funding spots really. Landing at the South Pole with him was when I heard about poles of inaccessibility. When I was up Everest two years later, I was thinking \u2018I don\u2019t really enjoy mountaineering\u2019, so why don\u2019t I try to reach all these poles instead?\u201d<\/p>\n

The last pole on the list, Eurasia, is tricky. It\u2019s in northwestern China, and travel for Westerners is hardly a package holiday. Not too many Rimac-friendly chargers either. \u201cChina is streets ahead of us in terms of automation, robotics, AI. It\u2019s clean, it\u2019s safe and everything, but the cost is the population is controlled. So even for a Chinese person to get to where I want to go, it\u2019s not allowed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironic, really. Nothing can stop a man getting to Earth\u2019s most distant outposts \u2013 except another man with a permission slip.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2031 NASA and SpaceX will deorbit the International Space Station. A rocket will dock and put the brakes on the 17,500mph village in the heavens, sending it on a fiery one way trip down to Earth. Most of it will burn up on re-entry, but some 40 tonnes is expected to make it through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-2166942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2166942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2166942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2166942\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2166942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2166942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2166942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}