We had no idea what to expect when we headed north with two of our photographer buddies to cover the 2010 Goldenchild Nationals, an eighth-mile snowmobile drag race held on a frozen lake in Vermont. It blew our mental doors off. We also froze our gearhead asses off, but that was a small price to pay to hang out at one of the coolest grassroots drag races we have ever attended, and that’s saying something, because we’ve been to lots.

If you want to skip ahead to the BangShift.com photo gallery, click here.

What sets this event aside from the rest is the fact that it is all heads-up, there’s some pretty serious prize money on the line, and the race focuses on gathering the quickest and fastest sleds in North America. It’s quality over quantity. There were racers from Michigan, the Dakotas, and even the reaches of western Canada out on the lake, which really says something abut the stature of this event. It’s an all star race and a feather in the cap of anyone who can win their class.

The equipment is some of the neatest stuff we’ve ever hung out around. There were hairy nitrous sleds, amazing turbocharged machines, and naturally aspirated sleds making 240 hp out of a measly 1050cc! We’d never before smelled race gas and two stroke oil together, but damned if we weren’t loving it by the end of the weekend.

So you’re asking, What do they run? Freaking quick! The track conditions, due to warm temps, were absolute junk according to the racers and yet, the sleds in the Top Gun class were running down in the 4.60s. That’s eighth mile time, not 500 feet, and that was way slow. The harder the ice is, naturally, the quicker the sleds are. The tracks are equipped with metal studs that grab the ice, except when it is borderline slush, the tracks don’t grip near as much.

The racers tune the hell out of these things as well. For the naturally aspirated racers, they’ll switch gear ratios to walk the sled off the starting line (where it went to mush in a hurry) in an attempt to minimize the amount the track will spin. Turbo sleds were just pulling lots of timing out of their machines to walk them off the line.

We saw guys running Big Stuff fuel injection setups, lots of MSD Ignition parts, and at least one sled was packing a familiar blue bottle with happy gas in it. Not being familiar with the snowmobile aftermarket, we were blown away by the motors in these babies. There were billet heads out there, and more than a few engines that contained not one factory part. Even the blocks were custom made. Who the hell knew?!

Classes ranged from 800cc sleds that were worked over factory models in the 800 and 1000cc “Improved Stock” classes, to the 800 and 1000cc Pro Stockers, to (our new favorites) Open Modified 1,000cc, and culminating with the Open Fuel Top Gun class which are the howitzers of snowmobiles. Running in the low 4-second bracket on a freaking frozen lake is beyond our asphalt car drag racing comprehension.

Some notes off the top of our heads on the weekend:

Shockingly, snow can stop a snowmobile drag race. We’ll explain. The track was using a normal drag strip timing system that relies on infrared beams reflecting off reflectors to act as the “eyes” of the timers to see when the sleds went down the track. It snowed hard off and on during the day on Saturday, so hard in fact that sleds would launch and not get a top end ET because the flakes were so heavy they were “breaking the beam” and stopping the clocks before the sleds got to the finish line.

Seeing the four wide qualifying sessions were really cool.

We NEED to drive a turbo sled.

This was probably the most beautful setting we’ve ever seen for a drag strip. A kettle lake set in the middle of a bunch of mountains is tough to beat.

The racers were awesome to entertain all of our dumbass newbie questions.

Track prep involves motorized brooms and snow shovels. How bitchin’ is that?

The BangShift.com mobile command center was a mid-1980’s Ford camper with a 460 in it. It rules.

Denis LeBlanc and Jay Spinella are kick ass photogs and are just as whacked out as the rest of us to leap at the chance to go and shoot this event. It was a blast and next year we’re thinking we need to get a hotel room and involve ourselves with the wild party that everyone was talking about. Hell, one of the racers offered us ‘shine!

Thanks to the hard work of Denis and Jay, along with some lucky lens work by yours truly, we have a gallery of 300 photos from the 2010 Goldenchild Nationals.

HUGE thanks for Denis and Jay from ActionRacingPhotos.com for taking the photo gallery to the next level with killer action shots.

We’re working on a full list of class winners. We’ll update this news with that when we have it.