Dancing on ice
Audi NZ’s snow event is about ballet rather than wrestling
Audi New Zealand celebrated 10 years of Ice Experience by promoting its quattro products at the Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground (SHPG) near Cardrona.
Held over a fortnight, the Audi Ice Experience has grown over the past decade to a sell-out mustdo event for Audi customers.
It’s aimed at not only promoting the vehicles, especially the sports line-up, but also enhancing the driving of customers.
Driven attended an Ice Experience alongside Audi NZ ambassadors’ Steve Dunstan, co-founder of Huffer clothing line, and designer Juliet Hogan plus her guest, The Project’s Jaquie Brown.
Also with us were existing Audi customers plus their guests.
“Audi was the first brand in this country to commence Ice driving for its customers following a tradition in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Audi New Zealand’s general manager, Dean Sheed.
“Little did we know at that stage that 10 years later we would be celebrating the anniversary with our customers.
“Quattro, our legendary all-wheeldrive system, was invented in winter snow testing, so its natural that we are leaders in driver training and have the largest programme in the Southern Hemisphere,” said Sheed.
“This year witnesses our 10-year anniversary of instructing our customers in the techniques of Ice Driving — we started the year by hosting 15 customers to our Ice Driving event in Sweden back in February and now we have just completed a two-week programme at the Southern Hemisphere Proving Grounds with an all Audi Sport vehicle range and
anniversary Huffer puffer jackets.
“To have many of the same instructors and SHPG operational team throughout the 10-year period is a core reason why the programme has consistently delivered a worldclass experience,” said Sheed.
“Every year we have many customers returning for the experience with additional family and friends, which is satisfying.”
With 24 people per sessions, head driving instructor and Downforce owner, Tim Martin, explained to the group what understeer (loss of traction to the front axle) and oversteer (loss of traction to the rear axle) meant and how the first would hinder and the latter help with us driving on the snow.
“The No. 1 goal is to the perfect the oversteer control,” said Martin.
Excessive acceleration or braking on the snow would hinder that control, he explained.
“You want to do a ballet dance rather than wrestling.”
Available for us to drive at the Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground were Audi RS3s (with a 2.5-litre engine) the 2.9-litre RS4 and RS5s plus a 4-litre SQ7 with 900Nm of torque — although that SUV wasn’t going to win any slalom races compared with the smaller models.
On to the snow tracks at the SHPG, and divided into two groups with a pair of instructors for each pod, we went through the feeling of over- and understeer before moving on to the power slide.
But before the first session began, we turned off electronic stability control (ESC) so we could initiate slides rather than the car detecting lack of traction and stopping us from carving it up on the snow.
I’ve been at the SPHG many times but doing the Scandinavia flick (a fancy name for drifting) never loses its excitement.
The Audi team had created a course shaped like a dog bone so you can initiate the flick and drift around the top of the course.
Once you get the feel of how to slide with control (mainly by on and off the throttle plus constantly moving the steering wheel), the rest of the day’s activities were there in enjoy, especially Audi NZ’s secret weapon — let’s just say it would be like driving on a frozen lake in Scandinavia.
To finish the day, it was a driveoff between the two groups around a slalom course with the top time of .51seconds (a driver from my group) winning bragging rights.
Already Audi NZ has had bookings for next year’s Ice Experience as it’s not only a fun day drifting on snow but a chance to trial their vehicles.