A car slides through wide, sweeping arcs on a frozen lake in western Norway, leaving curved tyre tracks across the white surface. The clip, Ice driving on frozen lake in western Norway, was posted to YouTube by teigas84, and it captures one of the classic Scandinavian winter pastimes: learning car control on ice.
Ice driving on a frozen lake
On ice, grip is a fraction of what it is on dry tarmac, so every input shows. Turn the wheel and the car keeps travelling straight for a moment; touch the throttle in a bend and the rear steps out. The wide camera angle in the video makes this easy to follow: compare where the front wheels point with where the car actually goes, and read the earlier laps in the tracks it has already cut.
That is exactly why drivers practise on frozen lakes. A large, flat, open surface lets you slide, spin and recover with nothing to hit, and the skills carry straight over to an icy road in an emergency.
Ice driving courses in Norway
Norway has organised ice tracks where visitors can try this with instructors. Rudskogen Motorsenter, for example, runs a winter experience on the frozen-lake ice track at Tisleia, reached from Gol in Hallingdal. Drivers work through a drifting oval, a technical circuit, a brake-and-avoid exercise and slalom drills, in Porsche 718 Caymans fitted with custom studded tyres.
These courses are popular with foreign visitors for a good reason. In northern Norway, roadside-assistance firms report that on days of snow, ice and strong wind, most of the drivers they pull out of ditches and snowdrifts are tourists. Experts put this down to inexperience: many visitors come from places where snow is cleared and roads salted quickly, while Norwegian winter conditions can change within minutes.
How strong lake ice has to be for a car
Engineers who build ice roads use Gold’s formula, which links the load ice can carry to the square of its thickness and a strength constant. Natural ice contains cracks and air or water pockets, so public roads are designed with cautious values. Thickness matters most at the thinnest point, and it can vary by as much as 70% over a few hundred metres.
Ice roads are built and run with care:
- Routes keep to deeper water, away from shorelines, shoals, currents and river mouths.
- Crews measure thickness at set intervals with augers or ground-penetrating radar.
- Snow is cleared or packed down, because it insulates the ice and slows its growth.
- Speed limits such as 25 km/h and long gaps between heavy vehicles reduce stress on the ice.
- Parked vehicles are moved on before water seeps up through a drilled test hole.
Drive on lake ice only at an organised track or a marked, officially opened ice road. Thickness and conditions there are checked every day.
Explore more: preparing for ordinary winter driving; reading a cold-weather map carefully.
Related reading
- A Nissan GT-R on a Swedish Ski Slope
- A Car Recovered From Lake Ice: A Video Clip
- The Canadian Ice Truck: Construction, Driving and Melting
- Lake Baikal Ice Percussion with irkDarbuka
No comments