Surf Cat

This is not ice fishing where you tow that plywood warming hut out onto Lake What-A-Hootchie and drink all day. Nor is it doing donuts in your favorite rear-drive whatever out on the snowy County Road 2. No, this here is high-class Euro motorsports history served on ice.

Zell am See is a famous European resort, as you know. In summer the Euros come here to windsurf. In the winter they wear those fox-fur (or faux-fur nowadays) enhanced beanie things and ski all day.

Zell am See sits in the Austrian Alps smack between Salzburg and Innsbruck—Salzburg you know from Mozart and The Sound of Music and Innsbruck you remember from the 1976 Winter Olympics on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. It’s all mountains and valleys, and it is cold as heck in the winter. So cold, for so long, they have to come up with things to do from November to May.

They used to hold a sort of winter-driving festival here from 1937 to 1974, including sports cars—often Porsches—towing skiers on an improvised racetrack scraped out on Zell am See itself (“See” means “lake” in German). Towing a skier is called “skijoring,” FYI. From 1928 to 1937 they towed them behind horses.

The fun went away for a few decades, but then last year, 45 years after the racing was last held, it was back. Ferdinand Porsche—great-grandson of technology pioneer Ferdinand Porsche and Porsche founder Ferry Porsche’s grandson—brought it back, together with the co-founder of Greger Porsche Classic Cars, Vinzenz Greger. They held the first revival in 2019. This year was the second. There will be a third, they swear. This year’s events took place last weekend, Feb. 1-2, and by all accounts it was just as much fun as back in the old days, except now they don’t race wheel to wheel and ski to ski around the track (just because personal injury lawyers haven’t discovered this sport yet doesn’t mean they won’t). A reported 16,000 people showed up to see what organizers called “Woodstock on Ice.”

There were notable names from racing, too, including American Porsche drivers Patrick Long and Jeff Zwart, who held a mini-Luftgekuhhlt Friday night before the races with five cars.

“Fantastic event … the makings of Goodwood on Ice,” said Zwart, who drove a car he used to own, a Werks 914-6 GT Monte Carlo Rally car from 1971. “Very festive, in the Porsche family hometown of Zell am See. I was going there to run the GT and then it looked like Patrick Long would go too, and that’s when Ferdi asked us to do something with Luftgekühlt. So we did a Luftgekühlt party pop-up on Friday night in the middle of town and then moved it out to the racing venue. It was really an awesome event. So many cool cars and so many cars you would never expect to see racing on the ice.”

American Tanner Faust drove his VW Beetle sideways around the track. Also, there were remade-in-America Singer in attendance (Singer is a boutique restoration shop in California that is in no way associated with, sponsored by, nor has ever even heard of Porsche AG, the maker of the 911, just for legal purposes so no one gets sued!).

There was a Porsche 718 RSK Works racer that won at Daytona in 1958, Gerard Larousse’s 911 ST from the 1970 Tour de France Automobile and a Group B concept 953—its successor became the 959.

European drivers on hand included 1984 World Rally Champion Stig Blomqvist, driving an Audi Sport quattro S1, and DTM champ Rene Rast and Le Mans winner Benoit Treluyer, who shared an Audi RS5 DTM. Formula E factory driver Daniel Abt piloted an Audi e-tron FE06 and a Porsche 99x. Austrian skiing two-time Gold medalist Marcel Hirscher drove a 580-hp Audi S1 EKS WRX quattro. BMW Group Classic brought three cars: a Mini Cooper S that had previously been rallied in the Coppa delle Alpi and driven here by DTM driver Lucas Auer, a first-generation M3 with DTM pilote Philipp Eng at the wheel, and a Mini ALL4 Racing from the 2012 Dakar and driven in Zell am See by Christian Menzel. Skoda sponsored the Ice Race Champions, won by German Rally champion Fabian Kreim. The Czech carmaker brought four rally cars from its collection, led by the Skoda Fabia Rally2 evo. Volkswagen brought the ID.R electric record holder, as well as a Golf-based eRI prototype driven by touring car driver Benjamin Leuchter.

Sports car and Le Mans winner Hans Stuck presented his 1976 Jagermeister Formula 1 March-Cosworth 741 with studded Pirelli snow tires.

Around 150 racers in eight different classes took part in the GP Ice Race. It was two days of freezing fun in the occasional Austrian sun. Plan ahead for next year by watching the event’s website. Until then, auf weidersehen, mein liebschens!