Phil Scott used to race snowmobiles also.
His introduction to motorized competition came instead aboard a snowmobile.
"My first snowmobile race was in 1977 at Devil's Bowl Speedway," Phil says. "I think I wrecked. The wrecks became part of the game and you protected yourself the best you could, but they were inevitable. I remember racing at the fairgrounds in Skowhegan, Maine and we had a huge wreck. I almost went right over the Funhouse. They carted me off to the local hospital and gave me an x-ray and determined that nothing was broken, so me and one of my crewmembers decided we could get back to the track to see if we could get into another race (the wreck happened in an early qualifier). The problem was we rode in the ambulance and we had to hitchhike back. There we were, with me with helmet in hand and my leathers on. A guy picked us up in a pickup and proceeded to tell us that he had been at the track earlier and there was a big wreck. He thought the guy might have been killed. Of course he was talking about me! We got back in time to qualify the second sled in a last chance race."
There was success but also more injuries and the eventual realization that speedsters with
four wheels were a lot safer than those without. "I learned a lot from snowmobile racing, and did my share of wrecking in that regard as well." Scott comments, "but towards the end, I was racing in the Formula-One division against racers like Jacques Villeneuve. "There are many car racers that raced snowmobiles during the off-season. I think Ted Christopher did, Tim Bender, The Abolds from New York; there were a lot of good competitors, but I found myself traveling from Manitoba to Minnesota to Illinois to Ontario to Quebec, and I got cold. I decided I wanted to return to stock car racing, which was really my first love, but I couldn't afford it in '77. I did miss some parts of snowmobile racing like the speed of racing on half-mile ice tracks, going over 100 miles per hour, on a sled that weighed four or five hundred pounds, but I didn't miss getting hurt and the cold.”