Safety, Handling and The Limit !!

Safety

One ingredient in Iceroadracing that benefits all rider categories is safety! and minimum risk for You and the bike. The racetracks are made on 20-100cm thick ices on the lake. Ice has very low friction and when you fall you just glide or steer of the track and stops after breaking slowly in the snow beside the track. In downhill skiing and bobsleigh they crash in high speed with just a "pyjamas" and escape unhurt. If you crash in Iceroadracing with motorcycle leathers the risk is minimal. If you do a highsider you are of cause sooner or later going to hit the ice and can get hurt. But on ice you don't have high friction asphalt that grabs your leather and make you tumble and hits arms and legs in the track. But the tires You think! The studs have only half the length of icespeedway stud and we have protection over the wheels for minimal risk. The safety key in Iceroadracing is low friction and a lot of space outside the track, but you still have to ride with your head on your own risk and responsibility. On ice you can survive a fall in 500km/h NAKED!

Handling

The feeling while riding is very hard for me to explain because everyone has their own way to see it, but basically it is much the same as roadracing. The difference with Iceroadracing is that you don't have to accept the condition (wet/dry) on the track as you do in the summer. Instead you create the conditions and behaviour of the bike by choosing or modify the tires. The grip depends on many aspects. The less tire grip gives a grip similar to wet riding and you can do wide sliding and let it drift out during acceleration, and the slides do not come too fast. It is possible to use even less grip to make a beginner learn how to do a 500 GP slide, due to the long reaction-time. With smaller bikes like my 250cc you can enter the corners brutally and it goes where you want until you learn to go really fast, then it starts to slide and protest and makes you to almost stand on the fotpegs. Beginners prefer the 250cc because they still are in "chock condition" and don't have the courage to turn on the power with a heavy and powerfull bike. The big bikes is actually easier to ride because they react "slowly" and give you the possibility to provoke powerslide to find out the limits if you just can be a friend with the 150++bhp under you. It is on your 2nd trackday you actually start to find the speed/feeling and come over the chock from the first day.
Provoked sliding
When the better tire is used the bike gets more nervous, responds directly and the sliding is more difficult because the greater leaning angle, but the grip is still not like dry riding, if you don't put even better tires on. It is also possible to mix different tire grip between front and rear to provoke the bike to for example slide very much in the front if you need to practice that. With Iceroadracing you can treat the bike very rough (forgiving some times while using the less tire grip). But there is no room for relaxing because suddenly the bike want to throw you off or you get a huge slide. I raced seven years in the Swedish and Scandinavian championships and to do Iceroadracing was like stepping into a new dimension of roadracing with the rear end dancing around under me in search of grip. This taught me to put allot of weight on the foot pegs to absorb the slides. This brings me to conclusion that you will discover many other weaknesses in your riding by using Iceroadracing while pushing you and the bike to the limits.

The Limit !!!!!!

An experienced rider knows that it is when you ride on the limit you actually learn fast and efficient. When you ride on 99-101% of your capacity you get quality training, not when you ride safely on 96% or 2 second slower than you did before. In Iceroadracing you get very god signals from the bike and can push and pass the limit with out hurt so much, due to safety. That's when training makes real progress for the rider. Do you get the point?