Kvartmílubrautin in Kapelluhraun: an Icelandic track on a lava flow from 1151

On the morning of 28 October 1979, twenty centimetres of level snow lay on the freshly laid asphalt in Kapelluhraun, on the lava field south of Hafnarfjörður. Kvartmíluklúbburinn, the Quarter Mile Club, had planned the first competition on its new strip for that day. It had to be postponed until spring. Today an asphalt circuit about 2.4 km long winds beside that strip, hosting the Icelandic racing championships, and on Wednesday evenings ordinary club members drive on it.

Location	Kvartmílubraut 1, Hafnarfjörður (Kapelluhraun lava field), Iceland
Type	motorsport complex: a strip for side-by-side racing over the quarter mile and the eighth of a mile, and an asphalt racing circuit (hringakstursbraut)
Circuit length	approx. 2.4 km
Direction of travel	anticlockwise
Opening	strip: spring 1980; circuit: under construction in autumn 2014
Operator	Kvartmíluklúbburinn (KK), a member of the AKÍS federation
Main events	Icelandic championships in car and motorcycle racing, the KK endurance race
Status	active

Twenty centimetres of snow

The club was founded in 1975. In that same year it began organising car shows and drag races on the sand at Hraun in the municipality of Ölfus. The profits from the shows went into a fund for building a track. The city of Reykjavík allotted the club a plot by the transformer station at Geitháls, and the line of the strip was even marked out there, but it turned out that replacing the ground would be too expensive. The club therefore signed an agreement with the state forestry service Skógrækt Ríkisins, which owned the land in Kapelluhraun.

Kapelluhraun is young lava. According to the Icelandic Institute of Natural History, it flowed out during the eruption of 1151, when a fissure 25 km long opened on the Reykjanes peninsula, and it is rough lava of the apalhraun type, that is, aa. Before construction began, the geologist Jón Jónsson checked whether the track would endanger the groundwater. Only after his opinion did the authorities of Hafnarfjörður give their consent. The work was carried out from 1978 by the company Aðalbraut, and the surface was completed in 1979.

After the snowy October, the track was formally opened in spring 1980. To this day the club describes it as the first strip in Europe built specially for drag racing, and since that year it has hosted the Icelandic championships on it. From the beginning it has followed the motto “Fast driving from the streets to closed grounds”.

A circuit instead of just a strip

For its first thirty-four years Kvartmílubrautin was simply a strip. In October 2014 “Morgunblaðið” reported that, as it put it, the country’s first real racing circuit was being laid on the club’s grounds. The project had been prepared for two or three years together with the driving school Ökuskóli 3 and the Icelandic Association of Driving Instructors (Ökukennarafélag Íslands). The club’s president Ingólfur Arnarson said that the new circuit would make members independent of the weather and would also serve for driving instruction. Two years later the president named the agreement with the instructors, next to the support of contractors and of the city of Hafnarfjörður, as a condition without which the rebuilding would not have come about.

In 2015 the club celebrated its fortieth anniversary. In March Ingólfur announced that the track would “soon be a circuit where real racing can be offered”, and that the widening of the strip itself would be finished at the same time. For the anniversary the club announced that it would bring in Fireforce 3, Martin Hill’s jet-engined car. The club announced a run along the strip in Kapelluhraun for Thursday evening, 4 June, and according to “Morgunblaðið” on that Thursday the car reached 215 miles per hour in 3.8 seconds. The same newspaper reported at the time that the club had about 500 members and that a circuit 1700 m long had recently been added to the strip.

The circuit quickly found renters. In the summer of 2016 Bílabúð Benna held a Porsche Roadshow on it, where Icelandic drivers drove under the supervision of Porsche instructors. In September of that year “Vísir” wrote that according to the president the club’s activity had grown two- or threefold, three or four events were held in a week, and a day’s rental of the track together with the clubhouse cost 300,000 krónur. The track also hosted, every year, the final tests of the finalists of the Car of the Year contest run by the Icelandic Association of Motoring Journalists (BÍBB).

From 1.6 to 2.4 kilometres

The first KK endurance race took place on 27 August 2017. Nine cars fought for two hours to complete as many laps as possible. Símon Wiium won in a Ford Focus RS with 97 laps, one ahead of Ingólfur Kr. Guðmundsson in a Volkswagen Golf. According to the “Morgunblaðið” report, the circuit was then slightly over 1.6 km long. That is roughly two thirds of its present length.

The regulations for the second round of the Icelandic racing championship of July 2021, published by the Icelandic motorsport federation AKÍS, already give a length of about 2412 m and anticlockwise driving. In June 2022 “Morgunblaðið” noted that the track was “quite different from its earlier shape”. On that day, in the Superbike motorcycle class, Sigmar H. Lárusson on a Yamaha R6 set a lap record of 1:24.866 in qualifying, and among Formula 1000 cars Gunnlaugur Jónasson won in a Peugeot. Jónasson won the title of Icelandic champion in September 2022.

Motorcycle racing quickly gained speed. In 2023 Jeremy Hill, head coach of the British club BEMSEE, came to Kapelluhraun with a course for KK riders. A year later Stefán Orlandi defended his title of Icelandic champion and improved the lap record to 1:22.466. “Morgunblaðið” pointed out then that the riders’ pace had risen greatly over three years, so it was important to look after safety on the track well.

The club’s calendar for 2026 provided for three rounds of the Icelandic car racing championship on the circuit: 14 June, 11 July and 16 August. The regulations of the first of them covered the classes Formula 1000, Standard 1000, Junior 1000, passenger cars and racing cars, with qualifying and two races of 18 laps each. In 2025 the endurance race lasted three hours, with a mandatory ten-minute stop every hour, and admitted passenger cars from standard to heavily modified ones, but only on summer tyres with a treadwear rating of at least 220, that is, without slicks.

Wednesdays in Kapelluhraun

The club’s grounds serve side-by-side racing over the quarter and eighth of a mile and on sand, circuit racing, time attack (timed driving), drifting, torfæra (the Icelandic variety of off-road climbing) and karting. In August 2022 the club announced that the first two special stages of the Iceland Hill Rally would be run on its grounds. Today motorcycles ride on the circuit on Tuesdays and cars on Wednesdays, from May to the end of August. The Wednesday open-track days were already in the club’s programme in 2022.

For an amateur driver the Wednesday sessions are what matters most. The club’s 2026 calendar lists sixteen such evenings under the name Brautarkvöld, from 20 May to 9 September, usually starting at 18:30. The club’s price list gives a fee of 6000 krónur for one session, and membership costs 9000 krónur a year. Current technical requirements are not on the club’s website. In 2016 the club required a helmet, a valid driving licence, a vehicle with a valid inspection, membership of a club affiliated with AKÍS or of the motorcycle federation MSÍ, and an extension of the vehicle’s insurance policy. For those who start regularly the club sold an annual competitor package: in 2022 it cost 70,000 krónur and covered the entry fee for three rounds of the championship and all sessions on the circuit, including the Wednesday ones. The club still offers rental of the whole track, but without a published price.

Fifty years

In July 2025 the club celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters at Kvartmílubraut 1. Three people were honoured: Sigurjón Andersen, on the board for nearly forty years; Jóhann A. Kristjánsson, one of the founders, who for years collected documents and took photographs; and Valur Vífilsson, long associated with the track, who set the latest track record on the Saturday before the ceremony. The mayor of Hafnarfjörður, Valdimar Víðisson, signed an agreement with the club on handing over to it Mótorhúsið, a facility that had until then operated under the Músík og mótor programme; the president saw in it a path for children and young people to work at competitions and sessions. The mayor put the anniversary this way in his speech:

“Fifty years of dreams born of petrol, drag races, gatherings, competitions, coffee, brake discs, meetings and visions of the future”.

Ingólfur Arnarson has belonged to the club and raced since 1981. In the club’s material published on the portal “Vísir” it was stated that he has been president “longer than he remembers”. The club then had nearly five hundred members, from mid-May to September the programme on the track was busy, and according to the president on most evenings someone was driving there. On the day of the anniversary, the day after a competition attended by 500 people, he said briefly: there is life in the club, and there is more to do here than “kicking a ball and chasing a golf ball”.