1Down4Up Ice Race – January 31

A friend and I watched the 1Down4Up Ice Race in North Center Lake in Center City, MN today. I wanted to take the Ural, but with my heated gloves not working right it wouldn’t have worked. Fifty miles is too far to ride at 5F with no heated gloves, and then sit outside all day before riding back. It sure would have been fun to take the Ural on the track though.

It wasn’t a big event. There were only about thirty racers spread across seventeen different events with no more than three to five out at once. The track was small (1/4 mile modified oval) which made spectating much easier as you could see the entire track from any other point on the track.

Above is a shot of the “road” across the lake.

Here you can see all the cars lined that attended the ice race. and a panorama of the track below:

It was fun looking at all the different bikes before and between the races.

       

Below you can see how many of the racers kept their hands warm while on waiting to pull onto the starting grid.

Entire families came to the event with lots of them having every family member race.

I like this bike and the DIY ice fenders.

I had fun trying to catch the racers with my camera as they flew by. It proved to be quite challenging and I took a lot of photos. One of the strangest bikes we saw was this custom chopper with studded ice tires riding around the track during one of the breaks. He went around about six times and only crashed once.

The fire department was on hand in case anyone crashed badly. Other than the chopper above, we only saw one other bike go down in the middle of the race. He got right back up and kept riding.

I made a video of the event and posted it to Vimeo:

The video is also on Youtube if you prefer.

I couldn’t decide which photos to keep, so enjoy the next string of thumbnails. :) The entire flickr set is here.

 

UPDATE: Cycle News Article about the day.