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Former Ford Performance driver Andrew Comrie-Picard was part of a science expedition that included a nearly 3,000-mile trek across Antarctica in a fleet of modified Ford F-Series Super Duty trucks. The team started testing vehicles five years before the expedition to the South Pole.
As a former rally and Ford Performance driver, Andrew Comrie-Picard has a long history of pushing Ford vehicles to their limit, though none of those efforts were as bone-chilling as his most recent conquest.
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Comrie-Picard was part of a team of seven explorers who ventured to the South Pole.
“We’re testing ourselves and our vehicles to the max out here,” Comrie-Picard said by email from Antarctica, where he and a team of seven explorers recently embarked on a nearly 3,000-mile trek to cross the entire continent to the South Pole through snowy, minus-40-degrees Fahrenheit conditions.
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The team started testing vehicles five years before the expedition to the South Pole.
As the science officer of the Transglobal Car Expedition, Comrie-Picard shared that his team was performing continuous ice thickness surveys of the polar ice cap, collecting data on cosmic ray penetration of the atmosphere, and sampling light pollution and the physical effects of extreme weather conditions on humans.
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The materials used in the production of Ford’s F-Series Super Duty and the trucks’ interior space were key factors in their selection for the mission.
Many scientists from around the world are working with the team, including those from CERN Switzerland, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
“Part of the challenge of crossing the massive continent of Antarctica, about 50% larger than the USA, is you have to take everything in and out with you, including your fuel,” Comrie-Picard said in a January 2025 diary entry.
Comrie-Picard knew that to pull off this expedition, the team needed to haul 5,000 to 8,000 pounds of supplies on sleds across the ice. And he knew just the vehicles to get the job done.
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The trucks were needed to tow as much as 8,000 pounds of supplies during the journey.
An exploration of this magnitude isn’t planned in a day, nor even in a few months. The team studied the terrain over five years and tested its four heavily modified Super Duty trucks — optimized for the grueling environment by Arctic Trucks — on several pre-expeditions in the Arctic. They developed a route from the continental shelf of North America to the Arctic Ocean.
“Data on cosmic rays has never been collected north of the 82nd latitude, and there’s never been a continuous ice thickness ground survey across the Arctic," Comrie-Picard said. “We were able to do both.”
Even with years of preparation, scoping the terrain in Antarctica and testing in real-world conditions, there were bound to be unexpected challenges along the way that required expert problem-solving. Setbacks like repairing tires or other components on the vehicle could put the entire journey at risk.
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The crew’s four heavily modified Super Duty trucks were optimized for the grueling Antarctic environment.
Around New Year’s Eve and halfway into the team’s Antarctic journey, they experienced one of those challenges. Ford engineers came across a news article written based on an Instagram post from Transglobal Car Expedition indicating the team needed help.
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Ford engineers helped the team troubleshoot issues from across the world.
Seven hundred miles from the nearest person and a continent away from a Ford dealership, the team hoped someone could urgently offer support as they tried to troubleshoot in the frigid conditions. Ford engineers reached out from all the way across the world via email, with both sides staying connected thanks to the expedition’s mobile satellite internet kit.
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The crew expects to wrap up its mission this spring.
Transglobal Car Expedition will complete its 31,000-plus mile mission this spring. Follow the last leg of its journey on the TGC website or @transglobalcar on Instagram.
As for how Comrie-Picard went from racing to circumnavigating the globe?
