F.A.T. Ice Race in the Rocky Mountains
If you weren’t there… well, you’ll be jealous.
Big Sky, Big Slides
There are jobs where you sit at a desk, open your laptop and hope the coffee is strong enough to carry you through the day. Then there are jobs where you find yourself standing in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by snow, roaring engines and lovely people who look like they just stepped out of a very stylish motorsport magazine. This was one of those jobs. This was an Ice Race in the Rocky Mountains…..hello?
Somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, not far from Yellowstone National Park, lies Big Sky, Montana. A place better known for skiing, spectacular landscapes and the kind of winter temperatures that make you question why you ever left your hotel room. Naturally, FAT International thought it would be a great place to organize an ice race.
After establishing the FAT Ice Race in Zell am See, Austria, the team decided to bring the concept across the Atlantic. The idea remained wonderfully simple: take an extraordinary collection of cars, put them on a frozen racetrack and invite a few thousand people to enjoy the spectacle.
For the first FAT Ice Race in Big Sky, we travelled to Montana to photograph the event and capture the atmosphere surrounding it. What followed was several days of incredible cars, interesting people, frozen fingers and some of the most entertaining motorsport we've experienced.
The FAT Ice Race has never really been about conventional racing. Sure, there are cars, drivers, a track and plenty of competition. But the event has always been just as much about the culture surrounding motorsport. The people, the design, the fashion, the music and the shared enthusiasm for anything with an engine. It's a rather unusual combination, but it works. Especially when the setting is as spectacular as Big Sky.
The Rocky Mountains provide a backdrop that would be difficult to improve, even with a Hollywood production budget. Snow-covered peaks stretch across the horizon, enormous pine forests surround the roads and the altitude makes even carrying camera equipment feel surprisingly athletic. We had come for the cars, but Montana itself was already making a pretty strong impression.
Wednesday: Arrival in Big Sky
Wednesday was our first opportunity to get familiar with the location. Before an event like this begins, there's always a certain amount of scouting involved. Finding the right angles, understanding where the sun will be throughout the day and figuring out how to move around the circuit without missing everything happening on the opposite side. On a frozen racetrack in Montana, there is also the small matter of staying warm. We explored the venue, met some of the people involved and started planning how to cover the following days.
The atmosphere was noticeably different from the European events we were familiar with. Everything felt a little bigger, a little more relaxed and distinctly American. And the cars hadn't even started racing yet.
Thursday: RUF, BAJA 1000 and Full SD Cards
Thursday was when things started getting interesting. The paddock was filling up with an extraordinary selection of machinery. Porsche models in almost every imaginable configuration, classic rally cars, purpose-built racing machines and a few vehicles that seemed completely inappropriate for driving on ice. Which, of course, made them even more interesting.
Among the highlights was an Audi Quattro driven by Lia Block. Watching a proper rally machine being pushed around a frozen circuit is already entertaining, but seeing it in the hands of someone who knows exactly what they're doing takes things to another level. Then there was the OPTIMA Baja truck. Together with photographer Christopher Paul Wardle, we spent time documenting the enormous off-road machine, a vehicle developed for an entirely different kind of racing environment.
The BAJA 1000 and an ice race in Montana don't have a great deal in common when it comes to surface conditions, but the truck certainly didn't look out of place among the more conventional racing cars. And then there were the RUF Porsches. For anyone interested in automotive history, seeing these cars up close is always special. Seeing them surrounded by snow in the Rocky Mountains was even better.By the end of Thursday, our memory cards were filling up considerably faster than we had anticipated. A good problem to have.
Friday & Saturday: Race Days and Shrimp Buffet
By Friday morning, the atmosphere had changed completely. The preparations were over, the cars were ready and the venue was filling with spectators. What had been a relatively quiet location just two days earlier was now a proper motorsport event. And what an event it was. Cars were sliding through corners, snow was flying across the circuit and the sound of engines echoed through the mountains.
From a photographer's perspective, ice racing is particularly rewarding. The combination of movement, snow and constantly changing light creates opportunities that you simply don't get on a conventional racetrack. The difficulty is being in the right place when they happen. With so many interesting cars and drivers competing for attention, choosing what to photograph becomes almost as difficult as actually taking the pictures. One of the most remarkable sights was a Ferrari Enzo.
A Ferrari Enzo is already a rare sight under normal circumstances. Seeing one at an ice racing event in Montana is the sort of thing that makes you check whether you've misunderstood the entire concept of the weekend. Apparently not. The variety of vehicles was part of what made the event so entertaining. There were rally cars, sports cars, vintage machines and completely unexpected entries, all sharing the same frozen playground.
With Don Toliver bringing music into the mix, FAT Ice Race proved the event was about much more than lap times or podium finishes.
Music also played an important role in the weekend. With Don Toliver among the names associated with the event, the FAT Ice Race once again demonstrated that it was interested in more than lap times and podium finishes. There was a strong sense of community throughout the weekend. Drivers, photographers, collectors and spectators mixed freely, and conversations often started with a car before moving on to something completely different.
For us, those moments were just as interesting to capture as the racing itself. The people standing around a car in the paddock, the reactions when something unexpected happened on track and the conversations between runs all contributed to the character of the event. Even the food deserved a mention. A shrimp buffet at an ice race in Montana wasn't necessarily something we had expected, but by that point we'd stopped questioning the details. The whole weekend had its own logic.
In the End, It's All About Having Fun
What stayed with us most wasn't one particular car or one spectacular moment on the track. It was the atmosphere. The FAT Ice Race manages to bring together people from different parts of automotive culture without making the whole thing feel overly serious. There are extraordinary machines worth enormous amounts of money, professional racing drivers and some of the biggest names in the industry. But at the centre of it all is a fairly simple idea: cars are supposed to be fun.
And watching someone drive a priceless sports car sideways through the snow is a pretty effective reminder of that. For us, the trip to Big Sky was an opportunity to experience a completely different side of American automotive culture while photographing some remarkable cars in an equally remarkable location. The Rocky Mountains, the people, the racing and the atmosphere made it a weekend we won't forget anytime soon. And if FAT International decides to do it all again, we certainly wouldn't mind another trip to Montana.
