The best pictures from F.A.T Ice Race 2024

The F.A.T. Ice Race is fast becoming one of the great staples and spectacles of the motoring calendar. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a bit like Goodwood, but colder, slipperier, and with significantly more lunatics strapped to planks being towed behind Dakar winning rally cars.

Since Ferdinand ‘Ferdi’ Porsche revived the legendary Ice Race in Zell am See in 2019, social media has become its most eager hype man. Every January, your feed is hijacked by a parade of machines – from the historically sacred early Porsche prototypes to the delightfully idiotic and culturally significant cars from here and afar – all engaged in an oversteer-themed, studded-ballet.

This is not a car show. Not in the traditional sense, at least. There are no roped-off concours lawns, no overly polished marketing types trotting out key messaging in reverential tones. The F.A.T. Ice Race is what happens when you take the full, magnificent absurdity of car culture, put it in a blender with some après-ski, a handful of Olympic skiers, race drivers, designers, fashionistas, motoring royalty, a few crates of Austrian lager, and then serve the whole thing at -10°C.

What makes it so intoxicating? Maybe it’s the youthful, TikTok-honed marketing strategy. Maybe it’s the neon-splashed, streetwear-infused merch. Maybe it’s the sheer, joyful inclusivity of it all – a place where a 1984 Paris-Dakar-winning Porsche 953 can pirouette on ice while towing a downhill ski champion, and no one bats an eyelid. It’s a heady cocktail of heritage and sheer, unhinged fun.

"We always wanted to do something for the next generation. That's how we started," says Ferdinand Porsche. "Our motto this year was 'Fun over Speed'. And that's the atmosphere here."

And he’s absolutely right. After a few years of disconcertingly warm, ice-melting conditions, this year’s event was blessed with crisp air, clear skies and temperatures low enough to mean the racetrack doesn’t turn into a paddling pool by lunchtime. The combination of sub-zero scenery and a full-throttle schedule – including vintage aircraft buzzing the crowd, new car launches in the middle of the frozen lake, and a Euro-house hangar rave after dark – was, frankly, glorious. Because it’s different.

Then there were the cars. And what cars. Driven by the likes of Timo Bernhard, Richard Lietz and Dakar legends such as Jutta Kleinschmidt, the grid was a fever dream of motorsport history. Porsche Type 64s slithered alongside WRC icons, Paris-Dakar monsters, oddities like the 911 GT3 Rallye, and the occasional hilariously out-of-place Fiat 500L rallycross car. The whole thing felt like a parallel universe where Colin McRae and Coco Chanel had thrown a house party, and everyone was invited.

The I.C.E. Race is elegant yet chaotic, grassroots yet wildly glamorous – a motorsport oxymoron that somehow works. If you haven’t been, you need to. Grab some friends (they don’t even need to like cars – they will by the end of it), pile into something suitably winter-proof, and make the pilgrimage. Or, at the very least, scroll through your feed and marvel at what you’re missing.

Photography: Malte Dressel/Huckleberry Mountain/Rowan Horncastle