Seven-time Tesoro Iron Dog champ Scott Davis from Soldotna -- the winningest driver still active in the world's longest, toughest snowmachine race -- isn't sure he's ready to retire, but he concedes that control of the race has passed to a new generation nearly half his age.

Davis turns 50 in June. Newly crowned Iron Dog champs Todd Minnick and Nick Olstad are 29 and 26, respectively.

Were they merely young and talented, it would be one thing, Davis said, but both are highly experienced Iron Dog veterans. Minnick ran his first race in 2002, and has done six since. Olstad competed for the first time in 2005, when he teamed with 34-year-old Anchorage driver Marc McKenna to win as a rookie.

Three races followed in which Olstad failed to finish, but he learned from every one of those adventures along the 1,100 mile Iditarod Trail to Nome and the nearly 900 miles of frozen Interior rivers that takes the Iron Dog back east to its finish line in Fairbanks.

And Minnick and Olstad, a pair of Wasilla residents who drive for Polaris, are not the only young guns now at the front of the Iron Dog.

For this year's second-place team, a pair of pilots for Ski-doo, the back story is almost the same as for the winners.

Tyson Johnson, 29, did his first Iron Dog in 1997. The Eagle River resident has missed only a couple since, always due to injuries. Partner Tyler Aklestad, 23, from Palmer, now has five Iron Dogs behind him.

Though they have yet to win, they were close in 2007, when they finished second 48 minutes behind race winners Davis and Todd Palin of Wasilla, and even closer this year, when they finished less than four minutes behind Minnick and Olstad.

"Tyson and Tyler should have won last year,'' Davis added.

They crashed out just before the end, opening the door for McKenna and then-partner Eric Quam from Eagle River. McKenna was third this year with new partner Dusty Van Meter, a former three-time champ from Kasilof. Quam was fourth with new partner Bradley Helwig, a rookie from Anchorage.

Even before the race left the ice at Big Lake, the 38-year-old Quam was expressing his belief this would be the year the young guns took over. Minnick and Olstad proved that to be the case, and they are probably only going to get better.

"We used to be able to count on them to make a mistake,'' Davis said.

No more. There were no mistakes this year.

In fact, it was more the opposite. Minnick and Olstad, who led nearly from the time they left Big Lake on Feb. 8, made a wise decision to run all the way up the Yukon River to the village of Kaltag before stopping for a mandatory rest on the second day of Iron Dog, Davis said.

The rest of the leaders decided to park for 8 to 10 hours back upriver about 100 miles in Galena. It was cold when they pulled in there at midafternoon, and it was even colder -- a brutal 60 degrees below zero -- when they rolled out in the darkness of the wee hours of the morning.

Worse than the cold, though, was the ice fog it formed over the river, Davis said. Poor visibility slowed all the teams making their way down river while Minnick and Olstad were relaxing in Kaltag.

Still, Davis doesn't think the younger racers are unbeatable. The only Iron Dog competitor to visit the winner's circle in every decade since the race began in 1984, the Soldotna businessman said that with the right equipment and a little luck, he could still notch a record eighth victory. He shares the record now with retired Iron Dog legend John Faeo from Wasilla with seven each.

Davis and Palin, the husband of the governor, finished sixth this year.

"I felt good,'' Davis said. "I train year-round now. More training has helped. I've got good legs. I do a lot of biking. And the sleds get a little better every year, which helps me. I couldn't continue to race if it was 10-year-old technology.''

He admits to thinking about retirement occasionally, but no sooner was the Iron Dog over last Saturday than he was on the phone consulting with the engineers at Arctic Cat snowmobiles back in Thief River Falls, Minn.

"I told them we can't keep doing what we're doing,'' Davis said. "We need to make a change. I stuck with the same thing we've been doing the last few years'' as the technology of other driver's equipment edged forward. Now, he thinks the others racers are on sleds just a little lighter and faster, which is what it's all about in any sort of racing.

Davis looks at this as a challenge to be met even if he isn't driving, even if he decides to step back and help manage a new, younger team of Iron Dog racers next year.

"The cool thing is the way this drives technology,'' he said. "I love that part of it. I'm continuing to test (sleds) right now.''

Old dogs might get beat, but they don't let go easy.

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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