Automobile Ice Racing
Automobile ice races have been most successful in France, where the Trophée Andros series, sponsored by an industrial jam manufacturer attracts ex-F1 drivers like Alain Prost or Olivier Panis, manufacturer-backed entries of sophisticated 4WD cars and international television coverage. The Trophée Andros races mainly use damped snow (that is not very different from ice regarding car handling) tracks in French ski resorts with a final race on artificial ice in Paris Stade de France. The 2006 trophy includes one round in Andorra. On several occasions a round also took place in Canada, in the Canadian Challenge, which is held yearly and is the most notable Ice Racing event in North America.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there were two major Ice Racing Championships, the North American Ice Racing Championship and the European Ice Racing Championship. The North American was held in Anchorage, Alaska and their champions include Earl Bennett and Chuck Higgins, while Mexican F1 driver Pedro Rodríguez, won his class and an exhibition race in 1970, and was 2nd overall.
Elsewhere, ice racing has proven to be a largely recreational pastime. There is no professional ice-racing sanctioning body in North America, but there are clubs in several Canadian provinces (Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec, Saskatchewan) and American states (New York, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota). Some amateur and professional dirt track and paved track racers use ice racing to hone their skills or to practice for the summer season.
There is a new class in Canada called SS (street studs) where a car can run with the same modifications as a rubber to ice class, without the need for a roll bar. Some clubs even encourage people to ice-race their daily driver, and have strict no-contact rules to allow that safely.
In Russia there is a rally raid event, called the Northern Forest run on ice and snow in the last days of February in the outskirts of the city of St Petersburg. Also, in Russia exist popular winter track racing, where pilots race on short ice oval track, usually hippodroms, covered with ice during winter.
Conventional rallying also takes place on ice. Most notably, the tarmac of the Monte Carlo Rally is occasionally covered with snow and ice. Also, the Sno Drift Rally in Michigan.
Read more about this topic: Ice Racing
Famous quotes containing the words automobile, ice and/or racing:
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson’s nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)