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In either 62 or 63 the local SCCA had ice races at Lake Phalen in Minnesota. It was part of the Winter Carnival and it was actually covered by one of the first weekly network sports shows. (CBS sports or Wide World of Sports -- don't remember).
The actual main competitors were Morris Minis -- might have had ice studs, I don't know. They were really buzzing around the track.
But there were also a fair number of larger and more exotic cars. Jags for sure and others. I seem to remember an XKE, but it's been a while so I'm not sure - XK120s for sure. It was great fun to see them floundering around the track and hitting a few snowbanks. I'm sure that the drivers of the more expensive machinery were pretty careful. I don't recall any real crashes.
There were also some pretty nice cars driven by some of the spectators. I THOUGHT that one of them might have been a Birdcage Maserati, but I only got a quick look at it. Of course I'd never seen one before -- nor since.
A few years ago I tried searching the newspaper archives and the interwebs. Sadly there was almost no real information available.
Nothing like that ever happened around here again as far as I know -- too bad.
Did a little more searching and I found a few things
This is a pic of a pretty famous driver at the time ( he won a lot of stuff -- although I was just a kid and didn't know anything about him at the time).
Then I found this vid from a 1960 race on Lake Phalen -- for that one they put sand on the ice and burned it in so that they'd have some traction. Don't remember that from 62
No sound -- it's a home movie, but a lot of different machinery racing about.
hj
i don't remember ice racing here, but i do remember sitting with the "old timers" back in the late 60's early 70's listening to them talk about when they used to race model T's and A's out on the bay in the late 30's and 40's
i also remember the bay freezing in 62, and being able to walk across it to staten island and back.
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