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Former F1 champion Jody Scheckter must be loving the old “friends in high places” adage… Stuck for a clever marketing gimmick for his new ice-cream range, the racer-turned-organic farmer called on the Mercedes F1 team for a little help.
A new race was created to launch Scheckter’s Laverstoke Park buffalo milk ice cream, but the ex-racer wanted something different for the ice-cream carts that started their lives as Mercedes-Benz 24-gear Fitness Comfort Bikes.
“I wanted something more creative – so I called my old friend Nick Fry at the Mercedes GP Petronas team, to see if he would be up for the challenge of engineering a racing ice-cream bike,” Scheckter said.
“To my surprise he was! So a few design meetings, four engineers and a wind tunnel later we have racing ice-cream bikes with suspension – I felt like I was back in F1, which was really exciting!”
The F1 team’s director of Wind Tunnel Operations & Special Projects, Graham Miller said, “We wanted to keep as many of the original bike parts as possible, whilst developing a method to carry a large freezer unit for Laverstoke’s ice-cream. Just as with our racing cars, a low centre of gravity was paramount to performance and we wanted to keep the bike as streamlined as possible and keep the weight at a minimum.”
The racing ice-cream bikes will be in action this weekend at a cycle racing day. Competitors in Scheckter’s sideshow include Olympic racers, globe circumnavigators and Polar explorers who will have to juggle “regular racing” with the task of selling ice creams.
South African-born Scheckter is no stranger to the world of competitive racing though; he won the F1 championship with Ferrari in 1979.
A new race was created to launch Scheckter’s Laverstoke Park buffalo milk ice cream, but the ex-racer wanted something different for the ice-cream carts that started their lives as Mercedes-Benz 24-gear Fitness Comfort Bikes.
“I wanted something more creative – so I called my old friend Nick Fry at the Mercedes GP Petronas team, to see if he would be up for the challenge of engineering a racing ice-cream bike,” Scheckter said.
“To my surprise he was! So a few design meetings, four engineers and a wind tunnel later we have racing ice-cream bikes with suspension – I felt like I was back in F1, which was really exciting!”
The F1 team’s director of Wind Tunnel Operations & Special Projects, Graham Miller said, “We wanted to keep as many of the original bike parts as possible, whilst developing a method to carry a large freezer unit for Laverstoke’s ice-cream. Just as with our racing cars, a low centre of gravity was paramount to performance and we wanted to keep the bike as streamlined as possible and keep the weight at a minimum.”
The racing ice-cream bikes will be in action this weekend at a cycle racing day. Competitors in Scheckter’s sideshow include Olympic racers, globe circumnavigators and Polar explorers who will have to juggle “regular racing” with the task of selling ice creams.
South African-born Scheckter is no stranger to the world of competitive racing though; he won the F1 championship with Ferrari in 1979.