Dani Pedrosa won the first Red Bull Ultimate Winter Race on a MotoGP bike with custom spiked wheels, beating an F1 car, a rally car, a Pro 4 truck and a snowmobile on a course built across 107 acres of frozen lake in Eagle River, Wisconsin, according to a Red Bull release dated November 12.
Red Bull Media House sent the release with a 16-minute YouTube video, embedded below,. Temperatures on the lake were -17 degrees Celsius.
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Video: Red Bull / YouTube
The five entries
Pedrosa rode a KTM RC16. Patrick Friesacher drove the F1 car, Scott Speed a Subaru WRX ARA 25, Andrew Carlson a Pro 4 truck and Gunnar Sterne a Ski-Doo 440 race sled, with Jeremiah Burton hosting. The release calls the F1 car “the Oracle Red Bull Racing car” and never gives a chassis. The video description names it as an RB7, the car Red Bull raced in 2011.
Representative image: a 2011 Red Bull RB7. Photo: Calreyn88 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
Speed is the lineup’s rally driver, in a sport where WRC has added Rally US to its 2027 calendar. Carlson’s truck is a V8 he puts at 950 horsepower in the video, and Red Bull has other off-road drivers on the payroll, such as Bryce Menzies, who we covered moving from Baja 1000 teammate to rival.
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How the course was set up
The release says the track had shorter inside lines for the vehicles that don’t belong on ice and longer outside routes for the ones that do. Sterne, on the sled, ran the longest line. Carlson launched off a jump at the start.
Every vehicle ran a calibration lap before the race. The video commentary says the five calibration laps landed within two seconds of each other, and that the rally car did its lap in 1:13. The sled carries about 400 studs and carbide skis; the commentators describe the MotoGP bike as having the largest spikes in the field and close to 300 horsepower. Friesacher says the F1 car got changes to tires and ride height for the cold, and that he would run longer spikes, like Pedrosa’s, next time.
Representative image: a Pro 4 truck at Crandon, Wisconsin. Photo: Royalbroil / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The result
Pedrosa credits the start. “My bike is one of the lightest vehicles, so I knew if I could gain a gap early, I could be more cautious through the turns,” he said in the release, adding that the tight turns made line choice the second key.
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The release says Friesacher finished “a close second” and gives no finishing order or times for anyone else. The video’s auto-generated captions are garbled at the finish and read as though the sled was second and the F1 car third, so we are only reporting what the release states. Margins are not given in either place, and the release’s line about where to watch the full race still has the word LINK in it.
Representative image: Dani Pedrosa at the 2018 Thai Grand Prix, on a Honda. Photo: Box Repsol / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
The release does not say when the race was held. Red Bull Content Pool’s photo captions date it to February 26, 2026, about eight months before the release went out. The release describes it as an evolution of the Red Bull Ultimate Race, which was held in Houston in 2024, and Friesacher compares the two directly. Red Bull’s F1 drivers have left the paddock before, as in Max Verstappen’s Silverstone kart gauntlet.
Sources: Red Bull Media House release dated November 12, 2026; Red Bull Content Pool photo records; Red Bull YouTube video and description.
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A MotoGP bike on spikes beat a sled built for ice and an F1 car with a world-championship pedigree. Did Red Bull design a fair course, or did the track layout hand the win to the lightest vehicle?
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
