One of our favorite cars in action was this '68 Charger R/T four-speed that's running a tu
We couldn't believe it when we first heard about this, but it's as real as the minus-22-degree-F stunner that cut through to our Californian bones as we stepped out of the airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in January on the way to see our first ice drags. Racing on a frozen river makes perfect sense and is completely mind-blowing all at the same time.
We met up with Jesse Bornfelth, president of the Merrill (Wisconsin) Ice Draggers and hit him with all the usual questions. Like, how does something like this get started, anyway? Turns out it's been going on since 1965, and Jesse pointed us to some of the old-timers who said, in essence, that there ain't a lot to do in these parts come wintertime, but there are plenty bars and plenty gearheads to drink plenty barley pops. It was only a matter of time before the three added up to a bench racing scheme that stuck. The idea was to race on an iced-over jetty of the Wisconsin River where it ran through Council Grounds, which was a state forest at the time but is now a state park. The event has been held there nearly every year since.
As it turns out, it's legal in many northern states to drive on frozen bodies of water; in fact, a few years ago, Wisconsin courts ruled that frozen waterways are "premises held out to the public for use of the motor vehicles" and that drink-and-drive offenses could therefore be upheld for guys cutting donuts in wintery fun while buzzed.
This view gives you an idea of what it looks like down the eighth-mile track. The finish l
If you've seen Ice Road Truckers on the History Channel, you've seen big rigs navigating on frozen seas with ice up to 60 inches thick. At Council Grounds, the river this year was frozen to 15 to 19 inches, which the locals call safe, though the standard line in CYA legal warnings is that "there is no safe driving on frozen water." Naturally, we asked if any drag racer has ever fallen through. No, though a few early-season plow trucks and support vehicles have gotten wet. By race time--which is typically five events from the second week in January through the first weekend in February, weather permitting--the ice is thick enough that even the pits are right there on top of the river. We once heard the ice fracture into a 12-foot crack, but that just says that the ice is hard enough to race on; apparently, softer ice that does not crack is what's more dangerous.
The track itself is a side-by-side eighth-mile with almost a quarter-mile of runoff. The timing lights capture e.t. and mph only, with no progressive times. We expected to see problems with cars slipping and sliding into each other and then not being able to stop after the finish line. Surprisingly, the cars go pretty straight, and if they do get out of shape enough to run into something, there's a bank of 3-foot-deep snow between two drag lanes that prevents car-to-car impact. At the big end, stopping seems to pose no real drama.
But what about traction? The Merrill Ice Draggers offer classes for plain rubber tires, but not too many racers take them up on that. Most run what are called nailies, which are usually radial street tires loaded with as many as 3,000 drywall screws threaded through the tire from the inside out, creating the ultimate ice studs. These things shred. Many locals believe that narrower tires are better for traction since they have greater contact pressure and dig in harder than a wider tire. Knowing that, we wondered how wrecked the starting line would become after a day of racing. Answer is, pretty wrecked. It gets dug out perhaps 5 inches deep, and near the end of the day, there's a bit of a ramp to climb out of as the cars launch. Starting line maintenance consists of just sweeping away the slush during breaks in the action. We didn't see any oildowns, but obviously they don't pose a traction problem. However, they've gotta be cleaned up for environmental reasons, and crews in the pits are required to protect the ice from any fluid leaks.
We were surprised at the number of regular ol' muscle cars racing on the ice. Thing is, th
In addition to their freaky race location, the Merrill Ice Draggers also have some interesting race classes. We most dug the oxymoronically named Stock Altered Rail class, which requires bone-stock, nonperformance engines to be used, but the car itself can be totally fabricated from scratch. The result is a mix of homegrown contraptions that, if you squint hard, sort of look like the very earliest rail jobs of the '50s. We wish there were a similar class available for asphalt drags. Maybe there's a germ of an idea there.
Other classes are for all sorts of four- and two-wheel-drive vehicles, plus a single Tuner class for front-drivers. Most of the turnout is mainstream muscle cars and bracket racers that do regular street-and-strip duty during the summer. They range from stockers to some real heavy hitters, and there's even a blown-alky dragster that holds the track record at 5.592 at 140.58 mph. Yeah, that's on 660 feet of pure ice. The two-wheel drive, rubber-tire record is an understandably slow 16.103 seconds at 53.36 mph, but other cars are as quick as Open Door Slammer record holder Suzy Schulz at 6.405 and 124.20 mph. By asphalt math, using NHRA conversion factors, that's roughly a 10-flat quarter-mile. The more typical muscle cars run in the 7s, or like a 12-second quarter-mile. Overall, pretty impressive when you consider not only the track surface but also the bitter cold.
The day we were there, the race temps had warmed up to about 2 degrees, but the windchill grew more biting as the day wore on. Locals walked around not noticing or caring about the snot frozen to their beards. Our camera batteries lasted for about 10 photos before dying due to the cold, so we kept spares tucked in an armpit under four layers of jackets and swapped them out every few minutes. The AA batteries that power our voice recorder for note-taking were total junk, and even the ink in our pen froze. So, if we can get there again, it'll be as racers.
Learn more at merrillicedrags.com.
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The races are immediately adjacent to homes that, during the summer, are on the Wisconsin
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A rollbar was added to this cool Model A roadster pickup in the days before the race. It's
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This Nova Pro Streeter looks funny on the tiny rear tires used on ice, but the GMPP ZZ572/
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Subzero race temps lead to some tuning challenges. Freezing is a far greater problem than
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One of the most serious door-slammers is record holder Suzy Schultz's Camaro, which she dr
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This sleeper '73 Valiant had what the owner described as a "360 and then some," which we t
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The Dehnel family and friends have several very-low-buck Yenko Novas as drag-racing winter
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One of the better-sounding cars was this hard-launching 540-powered Vette.
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Here's an example of the homebuilt rails that run at the ice drags. We'd be interested to
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Finally, here's the track's ultimate record holder, Don Woller, in a blown-alcohol dragste
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Austin Willis is just 14 years old but did some stomping in his dad's '30 Model A.
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This sand-and-mud dragster was the only rig we saw actually lift a tire on the ice. Note t
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Here's an example of a nailie tire that could more accurately be called a screwie. Up to 3
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The club tried and failed to borrow a Zamboni from a local ice rink, so starting line main