MEMORIES OF FINLAND

December 15, 2010 Vol. 6, No. 25

Way back in time, like 1985, I had a day that remains one of the best ever, and it involved a truck that I’ll bet most of you have never heard of. A Sisu.

A plain, simple, and seemingly mighty rugged cabover made in Finland by a little company launched in 1931. Sold nowhere else outside that small and very foreign country neighboring what was then the USSR, Sisu was a marque I’d never heard of either. I remember thinking at the time that there were probably other tiny truck makers serving only local markets elsewhere in the world. Resolved to seek them out but never really have.

I met that truck and its owner/driver at a crossroads in the serious boonies about 50 clicks north of Tampere, which is itself two or three hours north of Helsinki. In February. Minus 45. Nothing but white snow and green trees in every direction.

An engineer with the company I was visiting — Nokia, the tire side — had arranged for me to spend a day with this fellow, a logger whose wonderfully resonant name I now forget, a rough-hewn sort of middle-aged guy in overalls and no coat who spoke not a word of English. And my Finnish, a strange language related to no other except maybe Hungarian distantly, consisted of a couple of lines I’d been taught to help me pick up girls in clubs. They were going to help me no more there in the bush than they did in the town. Gonna be an interesting day, I said to myself.

But the point here is the truck. When we walked over to it and I realized it was a Sisu, I was excited. My wish to drive something a little exotic had been answered. Imagine, then, my chagrin when I climbed up into the shotgun seat, looked around, and spotted a little shifter plate on the dash that I’d seen often enough before. The truck had a Fuller 13! And imagine my further chagrin when I somehow realized that power was being made by a Cummins 400!

So much for exotic.

Anyway, my Finnish friend didn’t let me drive right away, but hauled us further into the bush where we loaded a bunch of logs and headed to the mill. We unloaded eventually, amidst the steam and smoke and wonderful odors of such places in winter, first stopping for lunch at a tiny little cafe where I had to guess at the menu and never did learn what I’d eaten.

I did eventually get to drive that manly Sisu, on snow-laden roads with crowns higher than I’d ever seen. It was a heavy three-axle truck pulling a full trailer at the end of a drawbar as long as the Queen Mary, and it stuck like glue to the frozen road beneath me. Must have been the Nokia tires.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the day’s story — it does go on — but I should explain that all this comes up because I had a missive from Daimler headquarters in Stuttgart the other day announcing that Mercedes-Benz has begun supplying components to Sisu for its new Polar model (pictured here) to be introduced next March. It’s headed for the forestry and construction markets, where Sisu excels, though it might be best known for its super heavy-duty military trucks with as many as 10 driven axles.