[ Prev by Date ] Member Login / Signup - Members see fewer ads. - Latest Member Gallery Photos Ice Racing! Posted by Dana Cartwright (more from Dana Cartwright) on Fri, 3 Feb 1989 12:51:02 In the northern half of New York State there are a great many smalllakes which freeze over solidly from mid-January through mid-March (eventhis year, as warm as it's been, the lakes are frozen). What better wayto spend a weekend than to plow out a racecourse on the ice and get somesemi-crazy people out there racing cars? To lend some dignity to thisactivity, we will call it 'ice racing.'Things start to 'heat up' on Thursday evening when a crew fans out tosample the ice on several local lakes. Club rules prohibit racing onless than 11 inches of good ice (lake 'ice' is not a uniform, simplesubstance, as what looks like ice is often a complex mixture of com-pacted snow, melted and re-frozen snow, and true lake ice, jumbledaround a goodly bit by wind pressure and oscillating lake water levels).A site is selected based on ice conditions, and the word goes out Fridaythrough a telephone network.Saturday morning plowing starts early. The Central New York Ice RacingAssociation, for example, owns a 1948 11-ton highway plow for this pur-pose (yes, just like those monsters you see plowing public roads, butwith the 'wing' blade removed). This not only clears a racetrack, italso tests the strength of the ice. Pylons mark the start/finish lineand 'pit lane.'About 10 o'clock the cars start rolling in. Some drive in under theirown power (New York has a relaxed attitude towards auto inspections),other are flat towed, and many arrive on trailers. Within an hour thefirst practice session is under way, followed by an afternoon of races.These conclude with the half-hour 'feature race,' the longest of theday, and the one which counts towards the championship. Sunday ispretty much a repeat of Saturday, with (sometimes) less plowing.Some years ago about the only cars you saw at an ice race were Saab's--model 96's or their various cousins. Today you would still see *many*96's plus 99's and 900's, but lots of other small FWD cars are in abun-dance, including Rabbits, Civics, and the occasional Mazda stationwagon, and even a Chevette can manage to negotiate the course. A typi-cal scene at events in central New York is an ancient 96, dubbed 'AgentOrange' because of its fluorescent orange paint job, equipped with a 3cylinder, 2-stroke, 3-carb engine, locked differential, clawed tires,and sporting a massive exhaust pipe which exits up through a cut-out atthe rear of the hood, dumping the smoke-laden exhaust (that's why theycall them '2-smokes') over the roof of the car. It's loud, lays down amean cloud of blue smoke, and it's close to the fastest car on thetrack.As in all forms of car racing, tires, of course, are the secret. In iceracing, where putting power to the 'road' is difficult, big engines andfancy aerodynamic wings are of little use. Tire and stud selection isdifficult because the track conditions vary wildly from one weekend tothe next, even from one day to the next. The tires which work the beston one day are worthless the next, and not for any simple, predictablereason. It probably has something to do with temperature, the composi-tion of the ice (amounts of snow, rain, and lake water in it), and theeffects of cars digging up the ice and dropping hot fluids on it.The first weekend of this season (January 28/29), all the races were wonby a stock Saab 900 (non-turbo, injected, unlocked differential) usingsome ancient, ridiculously skinny 145-15 bias ply 'Suburbanite' tiresbristling with a double row of 'Maxi-Trac' studs (22 to the foot), whichwere small even when they were OEM on the Saab 96. A close second wasscored by a Saab 99 running on 'Ice Tacky' tires, which re-semble the'knobby' off-road tires more common on dirt bikes, and are even skinnierthan the 145-15's. Hot competition comes from tires with #12 sheetmetal screws driven through the tread from the inside so they project3/16' on the outside, but the screws tend to back out during a race, andit's hard to keep air in the tires. So, the tire wars carry on...There's a kind of thrill you get by roaring down a straight stretch ofice at somewhere between 60 and 90 miles per hour (depending upon degreeof engine tune, the type of car, the quality of the tires, and the men-tal state of the driver), racing up to a corner until well past thepoint where you would have any possible hope of stopping, momentarilylifting off the throttle, touching the brakes, and twitching the steer-ing wheel to get the rear end to come around 'puppy-dog' fashion, andthen getting lightly back on the throttle to steer through the corner(you don't steer with the steering wheel, you simply hold the car in afull four-wheel drift, with the attitude control being supplied by vary-ing the amount of throttle you dial in). In the corner itself thedriver's window becomes the 'windshield,' because the car is actuallygoing sideways around the corner--this takes some getting used to. Asyou clear the corner, it's back down on the throttle, building up speedas the next corner races up on you, checking the gauges, checking themirrors, bouncing wildly down the ice, hoping the shocks won't rip outof their mounts (midnight welding, here I come!), hoping that idiot be-hind you will give you room in the corner, hoping all that water comingup in a rooster tail from the car in front of you won't drown your elec-tricals, hoping the Rain-X you smeared all over the windshield will keepyour vision slightly better than zero......hey, is this fun, or what?Cars race in classes, the fastest going into the A class and the slowestinto class E. Saab 96's using either the 1.5 or the 1.7 liter enginenormally run in class E. 99's and 900's have to start in class D be-cause they exceed 1.7 liters. Locking the differential bumps you up oneclass (96's to class D, 99's and 900's to class C). Running anythingother than the stock carb also imposes a one-class upward bump, and bothlocking the diff and changing the carb automatically puts you in class B('modified)'. Locking the differential makes the car go through thecor-ners like it was on rails (you have to try this to believe just howmuch of a difference it makes), but makes the car wildly uncontrollableon the straights (the ice is rough, so there is much shifting of weightacross the front tires, and whichever tire has the slightly better griptends to skew the car around towards that side, so the car goes more orless in a straight line, but with the rear end waggling arounderratically).It's been a bit warmer this week, so tonight the crews will be out bor-ing the ice on three area lakes, hoping for 11 inches of solid ice.With any luck we'll be racing again this weekend. The hot 900 with theskinny tires probably won't be as hot this weekend...different ice, dif-ferent temperatures, and a different shape to the course will be the de-termining factors...Shall I keep the Saab list posted on future outcomes?-(c) Dana Cartwright, Syracuse, New York, February 2, 1989. Posts in this Thread:
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