ICE RACING : Cars Go Slip-Sliding Away on Frozen Lakes for Thrills and Chills but Few Spills

It was sunny here, too, on Super Bowl Sunday, just as it was in Pasadena.

But the temperature here was 10 below zero.

Perfect for ice racing.

That’s right, racing on ice with automobiles--not motorcycles, not snowmobiles, not skates--but good old showroom stock autos of the kind you see on the street every day: Chevy Spectrums, Volkswagen Sciroccos and Rabbits, Dodge Omnis, Nissan Pulsars, Honda CRXs and Mazda RX3s.

The race was like two hours on a two-mile skid pad.

To keep from slipping and sliding completely out of control, as you might expect on slick glare ice, the cars have special racing tires equipped with steel studs, about the size of a dress shirt stud.

It’s as crazy as it sounds--and colder.

When the seven-race Amoco Ultimate Ice Championship Endurance series came to frozen Lake Neshonoc over the weekend, the timing was perfect. An Arctic cold snap gripped Wisconsin in subzero weather. Temperatures on Friday dipped as low as 27 below zero.

“Isn’t this below-zero weather great!” exclaimed Jim Cich, co-director of the International Ice Racing Assn., which sanctions the series. And he meant it.

“There’s a lot of racers around these parts and if we didn’t have ice racing, we’d go stir-crazy over the winter,” said Bobby Archer, elder of the racing Archer brothers of Duluth, Minn. When the ice begins to thaw, the Archers, Bobby, 32, and Tommy, 30, take their talents to the International Motor Sports Assn. series.

In 1984, the brothers had eight 1-2 finishes driving Renault Alliances in the Champion Spark Plug Challenge. Among the wins was Bobby’s in the Times Grand Prix at Riverside.

The Archers have won the ice racing championship 11 of the last 15 years and had things pretty much to themselves until recently, when manufacturers such as Chevy, Honda, Nissan, VW and Dodge began to lend support to teams.

Now the ranks include two Indianapolis 500 drivers, Geoff Brabham and Herm Johnson, with two more, Steve Chassey and Gary Bettenhausen, planning to make their debuts next month at Eau Claire, Wis.

Six of the races are held on frozen lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin, with the finale March 1 on Thunder Bay in Ontario, Canada. All are between two and three hours with a mandatory driver change.

It took 20 hours and four snowplows to set up the two-mile course here. It was 40 feet wide and lined on both sides with snowbanks. The ice was 27 inches thick.

Spectators line the course--but they stay in their cars. That way they can listen to a radio report of the race and watch while staying out of the chill.

From the banks above Lake Neshonoc, looking across the snow and ice toward the pits, the scene resembled something from an old Movietone newsreel of Adm. Byrd’s Antarctic encampment.

Surprisingly, the ice races bear a strong resemblance to desert off-road races--if you exchange dust, silt and blazing heat for snow, shaven ice and bitter cold.

When the cars race through a corner, sending curtains of fine ice billowing like a rooster tail, it has the same effect as clouds of dust in a desert race. It totally obscures visibility.

“The closest thing to it is pea-soup fog,” Bobby Archer said. “If you’re following close to another car, you lose sight of him but you’ve got to press on because if you slow too much you’re going to get walloped from behind. It takes a lot of faith.”

Even though a cake of ice appears to have a smooth surface, a two-mile road course bulldozed atop the lake is far from smooth.

“Tracks from snowmobiles aren’t apparent when the ice is first scraped, but as the day goes on, the ruts from the tracks get deeper and deeper,” explained Bobby Archer. “And sometimes, when the sun is hot, the ice will get sort of slushy and overnight it will freeze solid. That makes it really lumpy.”

Last week at Duluth, when the race was held on Lake Superior, a hole developed in the ice that forced race officials to bring out a snowplow midway in the race and carve a new course around the soft spot.

There was no danger of a car falling through the ice, but the depth of the chuck-hole created a dangerous hazard where a car could hook a wheel and flip over.

Ideal racing conditions are about 20 degrees, when the ice is at the right consistency so that it doesn’t blow like dust, yet the studs catch enough of a hold to make for fast racing.

Speeds between 70 and 90 m.p.h. are reached on short straightaways, depending on their length, but in all it is relatively slow racing.

Brabham is a native of Australia who has lived in Sydney, southern England and San Clemente, Calif., and rarely even saw snow until he was 30. “The first ice race I ever saw was two years ago when I promised Herm Johnson (who lives in Eau Claire) I’d come and race one with him,” Brabham said. “He and I had battled for the Super Vee championship in 1979 and had become good friends.

“I was living in San Clemente at the time, but went home to Sydney for Christmas. It was 110 degrees there when I left. I stopped briefly in Los Angeles before continuing on to Minnesota where it was 20 below.

“I loved it, though, and looked forward to trying it again. It’s nice to get away from the high pressure of professional racing and get back to the way it was when I started.

Johnson, on the other hand, is a native Minnesotan who has lived all his life in the cold. He was once a member of the U.S. Central ski team and won the ice racing championship in 1981 and 1985.

Brabham and Judd Jackson of White Bear Lake, Minn., who share Jackson’s 16-valve VW Scirocco, were leading the series after two rounds until Brabham ran into a lapped car during Sunday’s race here.

Brabham started on the pole after winning Saturday’s qualifying race and was running third when a car spun in front of him and stopped in the middle of the track.

“I had just committed to passing him on the right when he suddenly backed up like he was going to turn around,” Brabham said. “That did it.”

The front left wheel of Brabham’s turbocharged Scirocco was torn off.

As usually happens, the Archer brothers took over and won. Their second car, driven by Potter and Willy Lewis, a former Renault Cup national champion from Cumberland, Me., finished second.

Brabham’s wife, Rosina, made her ice racing debut last week at Duluth. It was, in fact, her debut in real racing of any kind.

“Rosina had driven in some of those celebrity races with other drivers’ wives and she wanted to try something else,” Geoff said. “I suggested ice racing because the speeds aren’t high, there’s nothing you can hit and it’s difficult to get hurt.”

Rosina wasn’t here for Sunday’s race, but Geoff says she’ll be back next weekend at Mankato, Minn.

Maybe she wanted to stay home and watch the Super Bowl.

Studs--how many, how patterned and how well they stay in place--are the difference in winning and losing on the ice.

The more studs the faster a car can go, so the IIRA decreed that there could not be more than 13 studs in one lineal foot of the tire’s surface.

The tires are standard 13 inch Uniroyal and B.F. Goodrich tires that have been recapped with rubber flanges to hold the studs. The tires, which cost $130 each, come with 36 studs a foot, so each team has to pull out 23.

The Archers have discovered that it makes a difference which 23 you pull and which 13 you keep. They are so secretive that they keep their tires covered while the cars are sitting along pit snowbank.

Ice racing began, as did most road racing, as an outlet for wealthy sports car owners in the late 1950s.

An organization known as the Canadian-American Ice Racing Series was formed around Minneapolis-St. Paul in the early ‘60s, but the Sports Car Club of America nixed the name because they figured it infringed on its own Can-Am road racing series.

The IIRA came into being in 1973 with mostly highly modified, expensive sports cars. In the days before studs, drivers would take slick tires and a grooving iron and make their own groove patterns.

“It took six hours to do a single tire,” remembered Jerry Orr, of Burnsville, Minn., who has been around ice racing for 20 years and now has two sons racing.

In 1977 a 40-car accident at St. Paul, similar to a chain reaction crash on a Southern California freeway, nearly wiped out the entire ice racing fraternity. No one was injured but the ice looked like a salvage yard.

It happened when one driver missed a turn while blinded by blowing ice. No one else could see, either, so everyone followed the leader into the pileup.

Not all the drivers and cars are from the frigid zone.

From their headquarters in Gardena, Calif., Honda brought Lance Stewart of Redondo Beach and Scott Gaylord of Costa Mesa with the cars they drove to win SCCA’s Showroom Endurance series in the summer. In Duluth, they finished fourth, and repeated again here Sunday.

For the La Crosse race, Honda also brought out Mark Wolocatiuk, chief driving school instructor at Riverside International Raceway and Parker Johnstone, chief instructor at the Bondurant School in Sears Point. They were running fourth late in the 60-lap race when they ran out of fuel, getting credit for 14th place.