Fifteen years clocked and it’s still hot times in the extreme cold for the German all-wheel-drive expert.

WHAT would you give for a fully immersive involvement into a luxury experience with an unrivalled driving challenge in some of Audi’s most exciting performance cars?

This year, the starting cost per person for the ice driving experience laid on by the national distributor had risen to just over $4000. 

And there was no shortage of takers. There never has been for this expensive extravagance. Most, in fact, spent more.

This spend is for more than just driving on a no grip, low traction surface in some incredibly powerful cars - in itself normally ‘a money can’t buy’ thing in New Zealand.

Also covered are two nights’ accommodation in a five-star hotel with breakfast, welcome drinks, lunch, coach transfers, drinks and nibbles at the region’s latest swank hangout, Ayrburn estate.

That’s the starter course. Most attendees appeared to have decided to splash out on the Pro experience, which lends all the above comforts plus a few more.

Also, whereas the standard cost requires two per car, sharing the grin - when you get it right - and grimace (when, erm, the car pirouettes into the soft-looking, but in reality concrete-hard, snow banks) - with Pro there’s no car sharing.

You’re solely at the wheel all day, gaining the undivided attention from a coach who is not only someone with huge motorsport experience but could also be brand certified ice driving expert. Meaning he or she will have trained in Sweden or Finland, on a frozen lake.

Go Pro and you also only ride the all-wheel-drive bus to ascend the Snow Farm access - yeah, the gravel road that use to be used for NZ’s equivalent of Pike’s Peak, the famous, and sadly tragedy-marred, Race to the Sky. But you leave the skid-up paradise on literal high. Taking a helicopter to Ayrburn, where a full-blown VIP dinner awaits. 

And, also, on getting to the hotel in which you spend two nights - the extremely comfortable Rees in Queenstown - there are gifts, including an Audi-branded Huffer super down jacket that I can attest is highly effective in minus temperatures.

Worth the money? Journalists invited to the 2024 event were spared having to put up a cent, so we’re hardly in a position to say one way or the other. But it certainly is a day unlike very many others you might ever experience in a car. And I say that from having attended five of these; not just with Audi in pre-Covid times but also with three other brands.

Ice driving was expensive with the others, too. But even when Audi started all this 15 years ago, it was a $3000 day. And assuredly everything costs more now. 

Not just fuel, fodder and the cars … almost certainly, too, the cost of accessing venue used for this involvement. Which has never been inexpensive to utilise. 

The last time I came to the Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground atop the Pisa Range, roughly equidistant between Queenstown and Wanaka, it was reputed the largest of several ice plateaus used by car distributors for this jolly was hiring out for north of $10k a day. 

That covers more than just pure access. Yes, this is one of the coldest winter spots in NZ, and this year Mother Nature helpfully provided a big dump of white stuff right before the Audi antic began, a week prior to our play day. But weather change up here can be fickle and fast; there’s no guarantee the elements alone will consistently deliver enough frozen delight. So the venue has more than 100 snow makers on hand. In addition, even deep frozen surfaces tend to get chomped up by  those spiked tyres, so every night they’re groomed. Everything costs.

Whatever the price, it’s chump change, assuredly, for the top tier users, here for serious work. 

Numerous car makes and tyre brands from all over the globe that flock during the height of winter to this place for testing of future products, often to finalise programmes that might have begun on remote spots in northern Sweden, Finland and Canada that hold the freeze for longer i the year but are obviously untenable at this time of year. Around 14 were here, somewhere, when we visited last week.

The serious side to SHPG’s reason for existing is huge business and, accordingly, occupies the greater part of what has become an extremely expansive venue.

Some of the sensitive areas bisect the areas that distributors access for their customer days, so you not only lose your camera devices when traversing those, but the car you will travel in is also constantly GPS monitored to ensure it doesn’t end up where it shouldn’t.

That side alone could make for tasty dinner with friends conversation, though of course the biggest brag always is how you came to master the skills needed to steer, counter-steer and drift your way through ice and snow.

That it has afforded on local turf is also a point of pride. And, if you think about it, a saving. 

As expensive as this outing might seem, bear in mind that before 2009, events of this type were restricted to the Northern Hemisphere. 

Richard Moore, Audi NZ’s chief instructor and also general manager for Downforce, the outfit that holds pre-eminent status in NZ for this level of driver training, speaks fondly of those frozen lakes. 

However he’s just as adamant, aside from delivering ice-capades on a grander scale, there’s nothing that happens in Sweden, at Sodra Lotsjon, and the Aaltonen motorsport venue in Lapland, eastern Finland, that hasn’t been successfully replicated here.

That the Audi NZ experience has been a dream drive for 15 years - not quite consecutively, thanks to Covid -  continues to pull in as many guests as it can cope with - 150 this year, including around 30 out of Australia - and is now emulated by other brands, not just a certain German rival but also high-end marques Ferrari and Lamborghini, suggests it’s overall been a dream drive.

Commercially viable? It never has been. Historically, the event is 50 percent subsidised by Audi give or take. There was enough financial risk for in the early days, when it was profile-building, to consider taking a break in 2011, but there was pressure from the factory in Germany to continue.

This year, its ice with ICE - as in, internal combustion engines - and an electric edge.

Only performance models make the cut; this year the choices ran from the hot and super-heated 228kW S3 and 294kW RS3 hatchbacks, the brand’s famously wild wagon, the 332kW RS4 (with a 260kW S4 in under study) and the brand’s biggest battery-dedicated walloper, the 475kW RS e-tron GT. All there to be driven sideways, always. So, stability and traction controls always off and no excuses for failing to do so.

Just you, a hot car and voices in your head: The Downforce trainers, as always, doing a great job keeping the chatter on the walkie, and calmly coaching you to improve your driving skills.

Words cannot describe. Which is why we’ve made this video.

The writer attended this event as a guest of Audi NZ, with flights, accommodation, food and a gift provided.