To put it very simply, Ice racing is a blast.
You buy a cheap, beat up car, put some snow tires on it and go race against other cars on frozen lakes. It's cheap, fun, and very addicting.
I found a 1984 300zx Turbo in Toledo for $300, and drove the 3 hours to go get it the very next day. This car was very nice, beautiful interior with the comfortable cloth seats, analog dash (none of that digital crap) and 92K miles. Save for some rust and being smashed into a guard rail by a 16 year old kid, the car was quite nice. The (automatic) transmission shifted great and had fresh fluid in it, everything electrical worked, the adjustable shocks worked perfectly... but there was no radio. I got to work on the front end with it starting like this:
Nope, it did not look good for this car. Had I not purchased it, this car probably would have been parted out and scrapped; what a shame. I managed to remove the badly mangled bumper cover after some hours of messing around with it. Then I hit the bumper the bumper (which had been bent upwards and in on the drivers side) with a 20lb sledge hammer until it was almost in its stock position, though slightly back. The passenger side of the bumper was pushed out on account of the drivers side being pushed in, so the cover would not quite fit yet. I duct taped a board to the passenger side of the bumper and drove the car into a tree (slowly) and that problem was fixed.
Now the entire driver’s side strut tower had been pushed back and in from when this kid hit the guardrail, this was a problem. I drilled a large hole in the upper frame, just in front of the strut tower, and then put a bolt through it backed up with some very large washers. The 5 foot heavy duty chain got hooked to the bolt and then to the trailer hitch of my van on the other end. 5 good jerks with the monstrous weight of the Chevrolet and the car was almost perfectly straight again. I fit a new hood and drivers side fender on it along with the new bumper cover.
I can't bear driving around a car that's 3 colors, so I had to go with the traditional black primer finish on the front of the car. Now it's looking hot, even better with the stick on bullet holes in the rear quarter panels.
Ice racing.
That's right, racing on ice... frozen lakes that is. No, we don't fall through. No, you don't get good traction with just snow tires. Yes, you race wheel to wheel on the slipperiest racetrack known to man.
MichiganIceRacingAssociation.com
