(Video by Jacob Marshall) – A short while back we ran a bunch of great photos that Jacob Marshall shot at the final Merrill Ice Drags event of the 2016 season. At the same time he was shooting photos, studying for finals, and not flunking out of school, Jacob was creating video from the event as well. He sent us a pair and we’re running the first one today. This is a really fun look at the last race of the season and it is a telling look at just how weird the conditions can get in ice drag racing, which many people would argue are weird to begin with.
Ideally the racers want the temps to be painfully cold so that the ice is super hard and their spiked tires can really dig into it, chipping it into shards as they accelerate. What you are going to see in this video is the opposite. It was a very warm winter apparently because there are large puddles of standing water and the top layer of ice is all but slush. That’s not the ideal condition but it doesn’t stop these guys from hammering the gas and getting after it.
The Merrill Ice Drags have been a Wisconsin tradition for more than a half a century and when you see the video you’ll understand why. This is such a cool and fun style of racing that we wish there were some of it going on by us. Who would be interested in seeing a live broadcast of this stuff next winter?
