STEERING ON ICE

Learning the nuances of driving on ice-a weekend spent gliding across the snow-glazed Tyrolean plains.

- RIAAN JACOB GEORGE

If you are a seasoned petrolhead, chances are, you've been able to drift a powerful sports car across a tarmac, or at a racing circuit somewhere. However, drifting an ultra-powerful car on sheets of ice is an altogether different experience. And when it's in a setting as surreal as the Austrian town of Seefeld, in the Tyrol region, with some of the best driving instructors on the planet-now that's experiential luxury in its purest form. While most people visit Seefeld to ski, I'm here to drive on ice; enrolled in the highly-coveted Audi ice-driving experience. As the name suggests, this is a guided drive, hosted by the German luxury car maker, where auto enthusiasts can test out the quattro performance of two Audi cars in conditions that are, well, not your everyday drive.

Not-so-gentle giants

We have two fantastic cars to train with: The RS e-tron GT and the RS 5 Sportback. The former is Audi's first all-electric sports car, busting all the myths of EVs with its beastly performance. The latter is a four-seater, performance-driven coupé with the plush interiors of a luxury sports car. And the experiences laid out before us include high-speed braking/lane change, oversteering, understeering, dynamic drifting and a timed circuit. Each driver must complete every experience in both cars. This is ideal for me because one can feel the thrill and rumble of the traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) (RS 5 Sportback) and the novel experience and silent power of a super-EV (RS e-tron GT). While the perennial debate between ICE and EV persists, The latter weighs in on account of overall handling and luxury.