Video: How To Make “Nailies” For Ice Drag Racing

If you’ve just had enough of winter weather wreaking havoc on your drag racing addiction for six months out of the year and can’t take another winter sitting around a space heater in the garage looking at your race car, perhaps ice racing is right up your alley. And in the northern reaches of Wisconsin, right in the dead of winter when the mercury is hovering right around zilch, you’ll find racers getting after it on a frozen-over section of the Wisconsin River with everything from purpose-built race cars to everyday bracket cars in winter-mode to pure street cars.

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But in order to do so, one of the first things you’d need — aside from a pair of long john’s and other assorted layers of clothing to keep warm — is what the locals refer to as “nailies”, or tires that have been strategically lined with nails or screws around their entire tread surface to get-up-and-go rather than sit in place and grind the starting line down to a pothole when the tree flashes green. That’s right, no chains wrapped around the tires here, folks.

While there are certainly more purpose-built treaded tires to be had, the cheaper alternative is the home-brew method of simply driving drywall screws or similar in a pattern right through the inside of the tire, as shown in this video from the Merrill Ice Draggers as their racers prepare for the coming season that begins in January. What this creates, in essence, is a combination ice racing tire and potential deadly weapon, that will absolutely get the job done but you’ll want to make certain you’re never standing behind when the throttle pedal hits the floor.

If you ask us, nothing says “you’re a badass” more than a collection of folks that nail screws into their tires and brave the arctic cold in the name of drag racing long after drag racing has gone into hibernation.