Snow is good. Anyone you know from Phoenix or San Diego or Miami may disagree; they are wrong. The simple reason is friction, or more specifically: coefficient of friction. Higher levels of that pesky coefficient keep tires from sliding, which has its place in society, but not for driving nerds looking for fun. The coefficient of friction of snow is much lower than that of pavement; lower friction, in turn, encourages slippery rear axles. And when you put snow on top of ice? Well, drifty magic happens, assuming you have a bit of room.
Subaru gets it and builds cars with the right priorities and hardware to take advantage of such conditions. The automaker also has a bit of room in the form of a frozen lake, where it created a school called Subaru Winter Experience. SWE, we’ll call it, is a program that uses a fleet of bone stock BRZs, WRXs and STIs (save for swapped studded winter tires), a staff of rally and ice racers, and access to Dollar Lake with a healthy, at least 12-inch-thick layer of ice on top. The lake sits just outside of Eagle River, Wisconsin, a small town closer to Lake Superior than Green Bay.
The event is hosted by the Chanticleer Inn and put on by a small company called FlatOut Sweden, which is run by Subaru Rally of America and ice driver Patrik Sandell. FlatOut works to give an authentic Nordic experience, which includes meals cooked by a Swedish chef named Daniel. Sandell, a Swede himself, has a team of instructors join him as well as a few folks from Dirtfish Rally School. While the SWE is much more focused on fun than strict instruction, the team is full of legit, serious rally drivers.
Two programs are offered, a one- and a two-day course. Both are quite similar. They use the same three cars models and go over basic driving techniques, the effect of stability control being on, off and in sport mode, and some rally style lapping. The two-day gets more of all of that and includes some e-brake techniques. For that reason alone, I’d recommend the two-day.
Alas, I participated in the one-day course and did not use the e-brake. Regardless, there’s nothing like an evening with a brief introduction from Sandell followed by a Swedish chef cooking with Wisconsin ingredients to put you in the mood to slide cars around a frozen lake the next morning. Before it begins, classmates pair up and then fill the day with authorized shenanigans around various courses with Subaru flag start/finish lines and snow bank perimeters. It’s a lark.
If you have some track or rally experience going into SWE, you might find the beginning of the day a touch pedestrian — accelerating, braking and “moose avoidance” tests, but it’s still a nice way to shake off any driving rust. And slaloming a rear-wheel-drive anything is nice, but the BRZ provides such excellent inherent balance that sliding, holding the rear-end out and eventually recovering it all comes with little effort and makes your smile a little wider.
In fact, throughout the day, the BRZ proved my favorite sled for this particular hill. Both the WRX and STi were faster, of course, with all-wheel-drive and slick center differentials, but whether we drove around the smaller winding course later in the morning, or the bigger course in the afternoon, the BRZ gave me the strongest sense of being in control and choosing my own destiny. That said, I will admit I enjoyed playing around with the center diff in the STI, commanding more torque to the back and feeling tough.
Both programs end with rides from the instructors, which is a good way to course-correct a wayward ego. Yes, you were giving up tons of speed most everywhere, you know, like the braking zone, turn-in, apex, and exit. Okay, you were decent at apex. Afterwards its back to Chanticleer for drinks, a certificate, and more of Chef Daniels Swedish succulence.
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