Ever since the motor was maded, people have wanted to race each other. In almost all of the world it was on tarmac roads, but in places like Norway it was on the gravel trails which make up almost of their roads. The professional racing like rallying and F1 owe their origins to these founders of tarmac and gravel motor racing. In places like Canada and the Alpine areas of France the automobile racings were not possible because of the icy weather which covered any road in snow, so they begun racing on the icy lakes and rivers and the motor sport of ice racing was created. The reason why, in these areas of the world, why they did not begin racing on the roads was because they were too dangerous, as racing on ice is very tricky. When you get it wrong you are going to hit something and when that something is a large immovable tree it’s going to hurt a lot. So by moving their racing onto icy lakes, where the wind tends to sweep the snow off the lake and pile it up round the lake, this means that when a mistake is made, the race cars tend to slide off and hit a pile of snow which is a lot softer than a tree.
Ice racing has mainly remained an novice sport, but there is a warm professional series called the Andros Trophy in France. In this professional series they use custom built ice racing cars, but in the world of novice racing this luxury can rarely be afforded. There are some rules of the sport to try and make sure everyone is competing on an even playing field. They are four classes of automobiles, and they are all limited to a maximum engine size of 3000cc. Class1 is for all rear wheel drive and short wheelbase automobiles, class2 is for front engine automobiles with front wheel drive and short wheelbase, class3 is for front engine automobiles with front wheel drive and a long wheelbase, and class4 is for four-wheel-drive automobiles. There are two types of races that these catalogues of vehicles can run in. There are rubber to ice events and metal to ice events. Rubber to ice tyres are standard road tyres with no stance, and metal to ice tyres are rubber tyres with titanium studs in them that seriously improve grip on the ice.
Any type of race car from saloon to small 4×4’s are allowed to race in these events, they can have a manual transmission or an automatic. They do need a little modification for safety reasons and for the rubber to events all that needs to be done is any plastic lights and plastic around the outside of the race car need to be removed, and the bumpers converted so they will not hook together. Also, the back of the race car is painted with patches of high visibility paint, as visibility can be low when ice racing. With the exception of a race helmet, these are the only modifications required to take part in rubber to ice races. To race in the metal to ice races your race car must be fitted with a roll cage and a 4 point harness, this is because the studded tyres produce a lot more grip and therefore speeds are much higher.
Although not a requirement, it is recommended that you fit a good quality wiper blade. There are many types of replacement wiper blades on the market that would meet this requirement. The best replacement wiper blades to fit are flat wiper blades made from silicone, and this is because silicon wiper blades will work quite happily in temperatures as low as -60? C, whilst regular rubber wiper blades will be unusable at that temperature when ice racing takes place. The flat wiper blades are recommendedbecause of their frameless design; this means that ice and snow cannot build up on the frame stopping it from working properly.