58 APRIL 2020 ~ CAR AND DRIVER
The GP Ice Race is the brainchild of Vinzenz
Greger and Ferdinand Porsche. (No, not that
one. Not that one, either. Or that one.) It’s a
reboot of an event that the town of Zell am See,
Austria, hosted quasi-annually from 1937 until
1974 , and it was for many of those years run in
memory of the Ferdinand Porsche who started
the company. The Porsche who organized
today’s race is his great-grandson.
Those old ice races shut down after a Unimog
preparing the frozen lake broke through the ice
in the lead up to the event, killing its driver. The
modern revival is held at an airport in Zell am
See’s Zellermoos neighborhood with a veneer
of sensibility thin enough to preser ve the origi-
nal’s spirit. Porsche, 26, projects a highly
contagious enthusiasm and speaks in
paragraphs-long sentences when he gets
going about the ice races. His reason for
resurrecting them now is simple: They
sounded like fun, but they happened
before he was born.
“Vinzenz and myself, we felt like the
wild, crazy times of motorsport were ending, that we weren’t alive
dUR[aURfdR_RUN]]R[V[T³UR`Nf`²DR¼Tb_RQ`\ZRaUV[TV`ZV``-
ing in motorsport. There are a lot of crazy people out there that like
to use their cars the way they were used back in the day when the
sport was still fun and crazy. Our goal is to translate this craziness
they had back then into the 21st century.”
Draws like Blomqvist’s S1 and Stuck’s March-Cosworth head-
lined this year’s two-day event in early Febru-
ary, but the on-ice action was heav y on audience
participation. It opened with an hour of public
go-kart racing on the ice. ( Who would have
thought we’d need cash at an event organized
by millennials and widely publicized on Insta-
gram? Dammit.) There were 138 cars entered,
ranging from a Porsche 911 GT3 RS to a Trabant
601 RS with horsepower well into the double
digits, and paces around the approximately
2000 -foot course attested to a wide range of
abilities and levels of commitment. Plenty of
gentleman drivers engaged in competitive put-
tering, seemingly afraid of the kind of surface on
which maintaining any kind of speed demands
the driver be comfortable with being side-
ways. And then there was the guy dressed like
a gentleman in black slacks and an orange-and-
white-checked oxford but driving like a maniac,The Ferdinand who
founded Porsche called
Zell am See home,
as has his family for
generations. Below:
Dualie Formula 1
cars were woefully
underrepresented.