Lead photo courtesy of Milwaukee Track Days
What a fun-filled weekend! I participated in two different events, and while I expected both to be somewhat similar experiences, it turns out that “Winter RallyCross” and “Ice Racing” can be very different animals!
Saturday, January 23rd: Winter RallyCross #1 hosted by Milwaukee Track Days
This was my first “Winter RallyCross” event, and so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I had assumed it would be rather similar to the Ice Racing event I attended last winter. As it turned out, this was not to be the case. The most obvious difference between this event, and the Ice Racing event I would be participating in the day after was the location. Rather than a frozen lake, this took place on a portion of the Milwaukee Mile infield road course.
For frozen lake racing, they simply go out to the lake, plow a course through the snow (if there is any snow) and you wind up with a fresh, relatively smooth, and flat icy surface to race on. For this event, we were racing on an infield course that had seen snow on-and-off all season, with lots of vehicles driving through it throughout. This resulted in ruts… and not small, rather insignificant ruts. I’m talking ruts that suck your car into them, and then hold it firmly no matter what you do with the steering wheel! Some of the ruts were so deep that when you slid into them, it felt as though you had slid into a curb; the vehicle hit it equally as violently (I actually smashed my helmet into the left side of the car a few times.) I was legitimately expecting my alignment to be completely thrown out of whack, but it was surprisingly unaffected.
Above photo courtesy of Nick Frey.
So, why am I making such a big deal about these ruts? Well, they wound up more-or-less dictating how you attacked the course. Normally the strategy is fairly straightforward: you want the tightest, smoothest, quickest line around the course. In this case, that strategy didn’t work. You’d get sucked into a rut, and then that rut would take you an entirely different direction, or cause you to lose grip (as the ruts were particularly icy.) Instead, I wound up spending most of the time trying to find the best line that avoided the ruts. This typically meant darting back and forth across the rut to get the car properly lined up for the next corner, but doing it quickly enough that you didn’t get stuck in it. It was quite an interesting challenge, but boy was it a rough, and bumpy experience. I was legitimately expecting to bottom out, and at some points I was half expecting something in the suspension to just snap in half.
The video below is of my best run of the day, which was a 109.174. That was good enough for 9th out of 28 in the two-wheel-drive class. Not bad! Chris Fairbanks (the red Scion FR-S in the photo above) is my arch nemesis for all of these events, and he eeked out a 107.973, so clearly he’s hiding some sort of illegal modifications somewhere on that vehicle 😛
Our fastest runs were actually some of our first runs (in my case, my second run out of 9.) As opposed to Ice Racing, where studded tires are allowed, they were not allowed here since they didn’t want to tear up the pavement under the ice. Normally, cars running studded tires chew up the ice, which makes for a rougher surface that us non-studded folks can use to eek out more grip. Without this occurring, the course quickly turned from snow-covered ice to, well, just plain ice, which means each lap got more and more slippery, and, consequently, slower. In any event, here’s the clip! If it doesn’t look terribly rough, that’s only because the GoPro mount is such a solid design, lol. You can see me hit a rut at 1:40 so violently that it looks like I bounced off of a curb.
Sunday, January 24th: Ice Racing Trials #1 Hosted by Wisconsin Autosports Group
This is my second Ice Racing event. I attended one with a different group last year. These are very different from Saturday’s event in that these are held on an actual frozen lake. This means no ruts, no walls, no obstacles of any sort. Just smooth, endless ice! Last year, the only obstacle was that the lake had quite a bit of snow on it. They had plowed the course out of the snow, but if you spun out or slid wide, it was possible to spin into the snow and get stuck or possibly do some minor damage to your front or rear bumper. By contrast, this year there was no snow on the lake. Just plain old ice. It’s basically impossible to hit anything other than a cone.
This event was arguably the more fun of the two. First off, you’re on a frozen lake! It’s so much fun driving down the boat ramp and onto a lake in a car (and seeing your navigation show you in the middle of a blue body of water.) Second, the course is a LOT bigger, with mostly long, sweeping turns. This means your average speed is much higher, and you have plenty of room to be sideways at speed.
Also, they allow studded tires at these events. While I don’t have studded tires, this is still an advantage for us non-studded folks. The people running the event purposely stagger studded and non-studded cars in each class. The studded cars run the course at a million miles an hour, throwing up giant rooster-tails of shredded ice in the process. Their tires rough-up the ice surface, which gives us non-studded folks a lot more grip. In these events, you will often get your fastest time not by necessarily taking the “most optimal” line, but taking whatever line the studded cars are taking, because you’ll simply have more grip, and get around the course faster by staying on the shredded ice.
For this event, we ran the course in one direction in the morning, and then in the opposite direction in the afternoon. Your best times in each direction are added, and that determines the final standings. My best times were 109.70 in the morning, and 107.85 in the afternoon, for a total of 217.55. This was good enough for a 5th place finish out of 19 in the Studless Rear Wheel Drive class. Works for me!
Here are the clips of those runs in each direction:
…and here are a few additional photos I took of the event.
