I once did something similar to that with my friend many years ago during an ice storm.
The highway was all iced over so traffic was simply at a crawl for hours.
There was a wide empty shoulder that was piled with a foot of fresh snow, I had nice new aggressive off road tyres.
Locked the axles on my truck and we went powering thought the fresh snow shoulder, which gave us great traction while all the cars on the road were gingerly crawling along the road which was a solid sheet of ice from cars having driven over the snow previously enough to melt it and then let it freeze back into a sheet of ice.
I'm pretty sure lots of folks thought I was crazy, but we made it to work much faster than them.