Nearly three decades ago, a man looked at Lac La Biche Lake and saw potential.
Ken Staples, an avid ice racer from Edmonton moved to the community in 1983 and organized the first Lac La Biche Winter Festival of Speed the year after. Last weekend was the 28th annual ice race in Lac La Biche – and Staples has been there every year to see it grow into the hugely successful event it is today.
The thick ice near the Mission buzzed with the angry-hornet whine of drag-racing snowmobiles, the cars trading paint on the racetrack, planes coming in for an ice-landing, and with visitors and locals enjoying a winter tradition.
“Look what’s going on here today,” Staples said with a smile near the racetrack Saturday while studded-tire Chevettes kicked up clouds of snow behind. “Every year it grows, everyone chips in.”
Drivers from around the province and beyond flock to the Winter Festival of Speed. The event is the last of the ice-racing circuit – the last chance of the year for these speed-junkies to put their toys to the test.
Zero to 60 in one second
For a weekend that celebrates speed, nothing touches the flat-out, blink-and-you-missed-it excitement of the snowmobile drag races. Brad Humble towers over his drag-racing sled – it barely reaches his knee. The streamlined machine looks more like a rocket than a snowmobile, with half a dozen chrome exhaust pipes snaking from behind the tinted windshield and a seat that forces the driver to lie on his stomach.
His sled, with its 286 horsepower moving just 436 pounds of machinery, can go from zero to 60 in one second flat (the world’s fastest production car, the Bugatti Veyron Super Sports, takes 2.4 seconds – and it costs $2.4 million). The Fort McMurray native wasn’t racing his sled last weekend; he leaves that to a lighter driver who maximizes the speed-to-weight ratio.
But Humble has raced before, and said the thrill is like a powerful drug – even more intense considering he’s crashed racing on grass going over 130 kilometres per hour.
“It’s a rush,” Humble said. “We have a hundred-shot of nitrous on this sled – you push the button on this one and your hair stands straight up.”
Reaction racing
A man who is no stranger to the thrills of racing – and the realities of crashing – is Jed Harrison. Harrison has been coming to the Lac La Biche ice races since 2004. This year he raced a Ford Festiva in the limited stunt and rubber-to-ice classes.
“It’s just wild and crazy,” Harrison said while tinkering on his car between races. “You’re out there and your car is sliding every which way – and then you’re pitting yourselves against the other guys. It’s man against man and it just makes it a lot of fun.”
The side of Harrison’s van reads “Reaction Racing,” and has an Erlenmeyer flask – a nod to his day job as a chemistry professor. When asked if there were any qualities that carried over from his chemistry career to ice racing, he laughed and said: “determination.”
Since he started ice racing, Harrison – who is also the vice president of North American Sports Car Club, the group that helps organize the Winter Festival of Speed along with Lakeland Classic Wheels – had to learn mechanical techniques from scratch. Now he’s at the point where he and his team can saw off the front end of a junked Ford and weld it to his racecar.
Mixed feelings on Mission
And like Harrison, the organizers of this year’s races had to make an emergency fix to keep things running. The Mission location is a band-aid fix – the races are usually held near McArthur Place, just north of downtown Lac La Biche. Staples said a huge pressure ridge created the unstable ice that forced them out of town.
“It was a great location we had, right in front of Lac La Biche,” he said, adding he hopes to be able to return to their traditional track next winter if the ice permits. “But we’re doing OK here, everybody is persevering and we’re getting things going.”
Staples noted that Mother Nature always has the final say: Saturday’s scheduled airplane fly-in was cancelled due to a snowstorm. But despite all the curveballs the weather threw at organizers, he didn’t hesitate to call the weekend a successful addition to Lac La Biche’s high-speed winter tradition.
“We’ve become a hotbed of racing,” Staples said. “And when we have a great weekend like this, it’s no wonder why we do it.”
