Cash rolls into Gimli

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This article was published 27/02/2017 (3171 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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GIMLI — The roar of not-quite-legal studded winter tires punches through the darkness as 16 cars make their way down First Avenue, past the breakwater and onto the ice.

The ice, in this case, is Lake Winnipeg, or at least the top 100 centimetres of it.

It represents the final stage of an invasion, an invasion by a giant multinational dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars into a Gimli economy that in normal years goes into hibernation for winter.

“It can be pretty tough here in winter,” said Gimli Coun. Richard Petrowski, chairman of economic development. His wife runs a coffee shop on Centre Street. “You make all your money in summer and then try to budget to get through winter.

“For the hotel, this has been a big boost for them. Their rooms were full for about six weeks,” he said, adding there was a time the Lakeview Resort shut down for weeks at a time in winter.

Mercedes-Benz, for the first time, established a base for its AMG Winter Sporting Tour in addition to its longtime home in Sweden. Of a variety of potential locations in North America, Gimli was the winner.

Customers from across North America, including Mexico, three days at a time, spent half of January and most of February hooning around race tracks plowed and groomed on 325 acres of ice just off shore from downtown Gimli.

Petrowski said the event created quite a buzz in town, with the town having to put up signage to designate a viewing area for residents who wanted to watch the action.

The program costs $3,995 or $4,995, and includes either three days or four days of driving, four nights of accommodation and all meals. Mercedes-Benz Canada spokeswoman JoAnne Caza said 70 per cent of customers were Canadian, 28 per cent American and two per cent from Mexico.

Caza said the impetus to expand the program to North America came from Germany, where AMG, a Mercedes subsidiary, is located, and the firm approached Mercedes-Benz Canada.

Caza said her team was able to narrow down to Gimli fairly quickly: a lake had to be north enough to remain frozen and the location had to be central for customers flying in from across the continent.

Having done two winter media programs in Gimli in the past, Mercedes was familiar with what the town had to offer.

“We came here and we realized there was tremendous opportunity — the lake is so big — and the hotel is right by the lake,” she said. “So when we looked at everything, it really was a no-brainer.”

With more than a soft launch — Caza laughed and said it was a medium-hard launch — the program was 66 per cent sold out of its 192 spots, organizers were able to smooth out some details and prepare for the return of the program in 2018.

Danny Kok, an ex-racer whose company, Driving Unlimited, runs driving programs for Mercedes-Benz Canada and who is the lead instructor for the Gimli program, said the goal is to keep coming back every winter.

Eight staff were on site at any given time, with four in Gimli for the full six weeks of the program.

Kok and Caza were unable to estimate the economic impact of the program, but the rough math suggests customers spent about $550,000 on this program, not including air fare or spending money.

Part of that money went to the local gas station, the hotel and its restaurant and the earth-moving contractor who groomed and maintained the race tracks.

“I’m not really sure what the number is, but I can tell you we’ve spent a lot of money in this town,” he said.

The primary market for the AMG Winter Sporting Tour is the existing group of Mercedes AMG owners, and, like the other advanced-driving programs Mercedes operates, serves a variety of functions in the Mercedes-Benz business model, Caza said.

“It’s branding, it’s marketing, it’s customer engagement. It’s all those things,” she said. “We know from the numbers in our other programs we do sell cars from it.”

The program’s cars were six each of three models: Mercedes-AMG CLA 45, Mercedes-AMG CLS 63 and Mercedes-AMG C 63S. The first two were all-wheel drive while the last was rear-wheel drive. AMG is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz and provides specially designed suspension components and tuned and hand-built engines to produce high-performance versions of existing Benz models.

Each car had winter tires specially equipped with 2.2-millimetre metal studs (the maximum road-legal stud is 2 mm). Each tire had 400 studs, and each stud was glued in place by hand during the preceding summer in Sweden by a husband-and-wife team that prepares about 600 tires each year for the AMG winter programs.

Kok said the studs are normally just mechanically inserted into the tire and held by friction, but for the AMG program are glued in place owing to environmental concerns originating in Sweden. “Sweden didn’t want the studs falling out and ending up in the lake.”

A shortened two-day event for media began in the evening on Thursday. In the dark, with the ice lit only by the headlights of the cars, a dozen journalists from across Canada practised drifting and controlled slides through slaloms and around a large circle.

On Friday, they put those skills to the test, navigating race tracks on the ice patterned after famous North American race tracks: Canadian Tire Motorsports Park, Mont Tremblant, Laguna Seca. The ice was plowed, flooded and then milled to provide a grooved surface.

Kok said while the program is designed to maximize enjoyment for customers, there’s a big takeaway for normal winter driving.

“You learn you don’t have to panic if you start to slide on ice,” he said. “You learn that by working the car the right way, you can find grip and stay in control.”

Today, the ice is empty, awaiting, perhaps, a local ice-racing club. But Kok said AMG will be back, recreating this winter-driving Brigadoon every December. That’s something Petrowski finds exciting, especially after hearing some AMG customers have already booked summer holidays in town and one is considering buying property.

“It could be really big,” he said. “You never know, someone from B.C. might decide to cash out of Vancouver and retire here.”

kelly.taylor@freepress.mb.ca