Ice road racing: a specialty for the boldest bikers.

After a couple of months of unusual mild temperatures, the North East winter has shifted its gears with blasting cold winds pushing our thermometers down in the low teens. Regardless in NYC the wintry weather is never long enough to make people overcoming their natural tendency to cocoon in their homes and other indoor places during the coldest time of the year. If anything, we challenge ourselves with winter sports, and in my case, along with others PMP guys, I go skiing to Vermont. Very often during these weekend trips I have seen people riding their snowmobiles in polar temperatures to get to the local restaurants and bars for a “hot date” or to meet their friends. They looked like the Michelin man with their huge specialized outfits that contain infinite layers of Gore-Tex garments to guarantee enjoyable time at high speed in the farm fields or iced rivers and lakes. I have always looked at them with some sort of admiration, but they suddenly became normal people once I stumbled on this video of roadracers challenging themselves on icy tracks. They are Swedish, people that have a long tradition of speedway (flat track) on ice, but I have never heard about iceroadracing …. These guys have some guts: it looks that they are wearing “normal” leather suits and also it seems that they are constantly on the verge of a huge high-side: I wonder how they would ride under ordinary conditions on a race track after training in “cold blood” temperatures and extremely dicey conditions.



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