Watch Aston Martins race in snow, proving the miracle of winter tires

With the right tires, you can do anything. You can make a Miata hang with a Porsche, build a truck that can climb a wall, or, perhaps most amusingly, outfit a 565-hp Aston Martin that’ll run laps around an ice-covered pasture in Colorado. Which is what we did at Aston Martin On Ice, an event that put a fleet of British supercars on a road course made entirely of ice and snow.

While normally an event like this would be organized for a specific reason — say, to show off a new all-wheel-drive system — Astons on Ice seemed to exist for the simple reason that it’s exceedingly excellent to drift a bunch of Astons around a plowed field outside Crested Butte. Which is reason enough for me.

While there are still rear-wheel-drive cars that are nose-heavy (see: Ford Mustang GT500), most of the sportier cars these days strive for 50-50 front-to-rear weight distribution. Astons, with their front-midengine layout and rear transaxles, all skew toward 50-50, if not a rear weight bias. So add a set of Pirelli Sottozero winter tires, and you’ve got a vehicle that will chew its way through some truly nasty weather. I used to drive a car with a similar weight distribution and tires (a 1998 BMW M3 on Vredestein Wintracs), and it would literally plow snow with the front air dam. The added attraction of this approach is that when summer comes, you’re not lugging around hundreds of pounds of all-wheel-drive hardware that you probably don’t need.