Putain, ca glisse! French Ice Racing goes electric
By Straight-Six, published on 15 March 2011
Everyone loves a good drift, don’t we? Watching movie car chases with great hunks of American steel spanked sideways is immensely fulfilling…and titillating. The Japanese do it even better, having spurred the creation of the D1 Grand Prix in 2000, featuring insanely tuned cars whose sole purpose is to go sideways for as long and as far as possible, drowning roaring audiences in billowing clouds of tire smoke.
The French, meanwhile, decided to give us a delicious, almost Nordic, twist on this whole drifting cockamamie. It’s called Ice Racing, and its just gone electric.
Doesn’t require much thought to to figure out that Ice Racing is about driving and drifting your vehicle of choice (two- or four-wheeled) around an ice- or damped-snow covered track as quickly as possible, while inconveniencing your opponents as much as possible. Rub, rib, attack and slide being the formula of choice.
Sponsored by a jam manufacturer – there had to be a link to food given this is France – the Trophee Andros kicked off in 1990 and was won by Eric Arpin in a Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 – a favourite of ours – while last year’s winner was Jean-Philippe Dayraut in a, ahem, Skoda Fabia Mk2. But brands and models aside, the series is just brilliant fun to watch, with as much sliding, banging and cutting up as your little eyeballs can take. And it’s even caught the fancy of former F1 stars, with Alain Prost regularly racing.
All well and good, you’ll say, so what’s the big deal? Well, they just developed an Electric class for the Trophee Andros, that’s what. And instead of the roar of the combustion engine, you get the high-pitched whine (yes, they need to develop a different sound for electric vehicles; Landspeeder from Star Wars, anyone?) of battery power. Some 122 horsepower may not sound like much, but when it’s pushing booger-sized buggies, you know it’ll be enough.
So it was that Alain Prost’s son, Nicolas, won the first-ever electric Ice Racing series in 2010. But beyond the novelty and fun of the show, this proves to us that motorsport can be genuinely exciting, even when it’s running on high voltage instead of high octane.
Putain, ca glisse! French Ice Racing goes electric
While the Yanks give us American steel spanked sideways and the Japanese fired D1 Grand Prix drifting at us, the French have decided to give us a delicious, almost Nordic, twist on this whole drifting cockamamie.
