Custom cycle

BIG LAKE — Every weekend this winter, Ricky Dietrich and his step dad, Gary Griffith, met up inside a tiny shed in Palmer. Often working into the wee hours of the morning, the duo painstakingly teamed up to create a machine capable of accelerating across the frozen surface of a lake at shocking speeds.

On Sunday, their work came to life.

Atop his bright-red, homemade motorcycle, Dietrich was one of a couple dozen motorcycle and four-wheeler riders to brave chilly temperatures on Big Lake for Ice Racing Alaska’s first official event of the year, Sunday.

While most riders rode factory machines, Dietrich said building a bike from scratch for the racing series made Sunday’s first run a special one.

“That’s the coolest part about it,” he said.

Dietrich and Griffith built the bike’s frame from a picture they found online. They fabricated the parts they could, and bought the rest, putting the bike together on weekends in what used to be Dietrich’s mom’s greenhouse.

“We actually put together a little 10-by-12 shed that used to be a greenhouse and we tightened it up, insulated it, put a heater in and built a frame table,” Dietrich said.

Dietrich’s mom, April, said the two would spend pretty much any free time they could working on the bike.

“They’d spend until 4 o’clock in the morning out there,” she said.

The motorcycle is equipped with a 450cc engine that’s identical to one Dietrich ran last year, his first as an ice racer. After they finished with the build, Dietrich said he took the bike out for a couple test runs on a lake near his Talkeetna home. The work had paid off.

“It handles really well,” he said.

Before Sunday’s racing action began, Dietrich said he wasn’t sure how he’d fare against the field. But when Griffith suggested that the best way to cap the story of the new bike would be for Dietrich to go out and post a win, Dietrich was all smiles.

“I’m gonna try.”

Dietrich didn’t get a chance to post a win Sunday, as the club decided to go with a “fun” format, with racers competing for unofficial glory while testing and tuning up their bikes.

Despite the lack of official points races, club president Ron Cravens said it was just nice to see the riders out racing around the icy oval.

“It’s race season, and it’s time to get going,” Cravens said.

The club has eight more weekends of racing scheduled this winter, with a points series and several classes divided among motorcycles, quads and youth divisions.

In order to reach speeds of 80 mph or more, the machines are equipped with special tires fitted with heavy metal studs. Veteran rider Dan Nichols, of Anchorage, said most of the tires are specially imported from Quebec and hold the ice as well or better than a rubber tire on asphalt.

“You can’t spin these tires,” Nichols said.

The club has more than 60 full-time members, many of whom have been involved in the sport for a decade or more. Last year, Cravens won the overall points total over Craig Reese, though Cravens said Reese would have won had he made it to more races, and said Reese is the favorite to win the overall title this year.

“He’s the one we all try to catch,” Cravens said. “He’s just unbelievably fast.”

Although being the fastest around the track is important, Cravens’ wife, Melissa, said there’s more to the club than just racing. She said many families get involved with the sport as a fun way to spend time together outdoors during the long, cold winter months.

“It’s something that’s positive and the whole family can get into,” she said.

That’s certainly true for Dietrich and his step father, whose season got under way long before the ice of Big Lake was thick enough to race on. For them, this year’s ice racing began months ago in the converted greenhouse that neither was willing to leave until their work was done.

“They didn’t even come out of there,” April Dietrich recalled. “Except to eat.”

Contact Frontiersman sports reporter Matt Tunseth at 352-2265 or matt.tunseth@frontiersman.com