Aussies iced again

It was the most excruciating five minutes of my life. Stranded in a snow bank, strapped tight into a race-prepped Mazda MX-5, forced to wait patiently for the recovery vehicle to tow me out.

And watch the number one Russian car that I’d just overtaken for the lead slither back past, followed by the entire nine-car field including teams from Great Britain, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Netherlands and Ukraine. Twice.

By then I was hyperventilating in a sweaty, claustrophobic frenzy, and any ideas of getting out and pushing my MX-5 back onto the track – a metre or so forwards would have freed me – were nixed by the chance of being excluded from the race for doing so or, worse still, mown down by an opportunistic Russian on a frozen lake in Siberia.

Having travelled for more than 30 hours to the other side of the world, to an ice-cold lake outside Ekaterinburg more than 1000km east of Moscow, my thoughts turned to the bollocking I would cop not just from the Russian scribes that beat us in our last two meetings, but my three short-changed teammates in the Australian ‘A-team’.

Granted, for Mazda the 2014 MX-5 Ice Race was merely an extravagant PR stunt to publicise the world’s top-selling roadster in the final year of its model life.

This time it also showcased the all-new Mazda3, which was also part of the race for the first time, just a month after its Australian launch.

But for us Aussies it was a chance to redeem our two previous losses to the dominant Russians during similar events in 2011 and 2012, and to uphold the nation’s honour in the face of new challenges from five other countries.

There was pressure from within, too, with the four-man ‘Australia A’ team made up of the four fastest finishers from the 2013 MX-5 Media Challenge in Canberra, including yours truly, the B-team comprising two other Aussie journos and two Mazda Australia executives, and some serious rivalry to determine the pecking order in each team.

It had all started well enough though, with our team posting the third fastest time in the first day’s practice, after a 20-minute session each in both the MX-5 and Mazda3 on an icy 4.1km track comprising both fast sweepers and tight hairpins all carved out by a tractor blade.

This year’s track was much faster and grippier than the tight and twisting circuit scraped out on a much smaller frozen lake closer to Russia’s third largest city in 2012, but despite the studded tyres fitted to both cars grip was still almost non-existent on the darkest swept-clean parts, which also happened to be the fastest.

So in both cars it was a case of turn in, slide wide while you wait for the front tyres to bite, then get as close as possible to the apex before easing the power gingerly back on in an attempt to extract as much traction as possible amid the constant wheel spin.

In the rear-wheel drive MX-5 fourth gear offered the most controllable tail-out exits from the slowest 30km/h switchbacks (any lower gear resulted in excessive wheel spin and overly sideways action).

And if you were brave enough the faster sections could be taken wide open in fifth gear at speeds in excess of 130km/h – provided you were on the right line and applied the right amount of throttle at the right time in the changing conditions, which included mid-corner bumps that got nastier every lap.

Naturally, the MX-5s were more involving and generally up to 10 seconds a lap faster than the front-wheel drive Mazda3s, which came with less powerful 2.0-litre engines, automatic transmissions and larger and wider 18-inch tyres but with shorter studs, providing less grip.

Anything under four minutes was a good lap time in the Mazda3, with which all teams had to set their qualifying time on the morning of day two, when the sun actually emerged and temperatures rose to about three degrees C. Apparently it had been -20 degrees just the previous week.

We matched our third-place practice time in qualifying to place us third on the grid; behind the two top Russian teams but ahead of the third -- despite their obvious advantage in spending more time on icy roads and having an extra day’s track time before we arrived, by which time a total of 24 Russian journalists had been whittled down to the quickest 12.

The race format included a scoring system in which points were awarded on race day for qualifying and both two-hour endurance races – and after driving cleanly and consistently to finish third in the first (Mazda3) race we were all happy to be on target for a podium position.

So imagine our surprise when after starting from third in the final (MX-5) race of the day our lead driver shot to the lead and stayed there for the first three laps, ahead of the favourite #10 Russian car, which had started in fifth in the reverse-grid final.

After a tight tussle for the lead that raised more than a few eyebrows, the number one local driver eventually got past us, so when my turn came at the first driver change the pressure was on to hold down second.

A slick pit stop helped us exit pit lane right behind the leading #10 car and after scything precariously through a few backmarkers I was shocked to remain right on its tail.

Before the end of my first lap I had the chance to dive underneath it into the first of three hairpins leading back onto the main straight, where we re-emerged in the lead and began to break away, to the apparent surprise of the parochial Russian commentator.

Just one lap later disaster struck, however, when with snow starting to fall the MX-5’s front right tyre stoved into a deepening puddle at one of the fastest parts of the track, ripping the steering wheel to the right and putting me into a lurid high-speed slide, wide open in fifth gear.

Somehow the car stayed on track while it corrected itself but before I knew it we were sideways again in the opposite direction – heading directly for the metre-high snow berm that surrounded the temporary circuit.

Convinced that an unscheduled meeting with the snow Gods was now inevitable, I stayed on the gas in an attempt to soften the impact by hitting the snow with the rear of the car rather than the front, thus reducing the chance of getting bogged.

Obviously that failed, and despite vain attempts to rock the car out using first, reverse and every other gear, I was stuck solid and in the hands of Victor the recovery vehicle driver, who took what seemed an eternity to arrive then insisted on meticulously attaching a cable to the tow hook rather than simply nudging me out from behind.

The upshot? The MX-5 emerged unscathed and I limped back to the pits with tail between legs, laying low while my teammates attempted to rescue our credibility.

Despite getting stuck behind the pace car, which came out for yet another incident, putting us yet another lap down, they did so by clawing back seventh – ahead of the other Aussies and the even more crash-prone English.

Apparently that was enough to score us fifth overall and second in the ‘Nations Cup’ for non-Russian teams, behind the Ukranians.

No, it wasn’t the result we’d hoped for – in fact it was a monumental anticlimax after actually leading almost half the race – but the 2014 MX-5 Ice Race proved that maybe, just maybe, the Russians can be beaten at their own game.

And that racing Mazda’s iconic roadster on ice is one of the most entertaining things you can do on four wheels.

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