Pikes Peak is a meleé of parts, a free-for-all of power. Homebuilt open-wheelers vie with quads. Production-based sports cars do battle with electric vehicles purpose-built for the 14,114-foot-tall mountain. Bikes take on classic '60s muscle. Locals whose families have raced on the mountain for generations take on international stars. This year, Le Mans winner Romaine Dumas was among the carpetbaggers who arrived on the mountain in Colorado, returning with a team of his own assemblage and a Norma prototype racer set up for the hill.
On the motorcycle side, British cultural phenomenon Guy Martin showed up on a nutsoid homebrewed bike with a turbocharged Suzuki GSX-R 1100 engine. Martin, perhaps most widely associated with the Isle of Man TT, has never managed a win on the Snaefell Mountain course. If the thing he brought held together, Martin felt he might have a shot at an overall win.
Perennial favorite and nice guy Jeff Zwart showed up in a flawless-looking turbocharged 997 GT3 built by BBI Autosport. Fast from the very start, with the fastest time in Time Attack 1 qualifying and consistently top-of-the-class practice times, Zwart looked to have a class victory on lock.
But the big contest on race day was between gas, electricity, and, uh, electricity. Dumas' Haribo-liveried Norma was the favorite, but an ever-so-slightly off-pace run could've put the pair of Mitsubishi MiEV Evo III EVs in contention for the overall win. Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima, past overall winner and the first driver to break 10 minutes on the mountain, had trouble keeping up with the Mitsus, which were driven by former motorcycle racer Greg Tracy and Dakar vet Hiroshi Masuoka.
In the end, Dumas held off the hard-charging—pun intended—Mitsubishi MiEV Evo IIIs by a shade over two seconds, posting a 9:05.801 to Tracy's 9:08.188. Masuoka was four seconds behind Tracy, making it to the top of the mountain in 9:12.204. Tajima hustled his fighter-canopied E-Runner to the finish line in 9:43.900. Clint Vahscholz clocked in at 9:54.700, rounding out the overall top five in a classic Ford-powered Pikes Peak open-wheeler.
Interestingly, the Japanese EVs were practically as native to the Peak as Vahscholz's car, being machines purpose-built to tame the hill as a proof of concept. It's a perfect place to showcase an electric vehicle's strengths. Electric motors are unaffected by the thin air at high altitude, and the 12.42-mile course is short enough that battery capacity isn't a major factor. Motors at each wheel allow for extra grip out of tight corners, and right-now down-low torque coupled with finely tuned traction control means that all the power required and not a smidgen more makes it to the tarmac.
Nothing this year was as gripping as Tajima's sub-10-minute run back when the top of the course was still unpaved, nor as mind-bending as Sébastien Loeb's 8:13.878 ascent in 2013. Even Rhys Millen's 2nd-place finish last year—9:02.192—beat out Dumas' winning time by over three seconds. Nope, for better or for worse, the real story of the 92nd running of the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb was the encroachment of the EVs.
Greg Tracy, now the first man to scale the mountain in under 10 minutes on both two wheels and four, noted that "We walked away with a lot this week. We were six seconds faster on the top, [Dumas] was nine seconds faster at the bottom." It's only a matter of time until the EVs make up that time at the bottom. We figure one more cycle of battery technology advancement and the cars will be there.
Shameless tinkerer Guy Martin's dream of an overall win didn't pan out. We heard a rumor that in the face of insurmountable high-RPM fuel-system issues, Martin's team set his Martek/Suzuki's rev limiter to 5000 rpm, then sent him on his way. In that light, his 11:32.558 is pretty impressive. And Martin didn't head back to the British Isles empty handed—he walked off with the UTV/Exhibition class trophy for his trouble.
Also suffering from fuel-system woes was Jeff Zwart. After running so strongly in qualifying and practice, his 911 developed a sputter at the start. One of the fuel pumps had given up the ghost. He lost first in Time Attack 1 by 1.173 seconds to Vincent Beltoise's 10:00.744. The normally genial and upbeat Zwart looked about as hangdog as anybody we saw on the mountain that day. The man does not enjoy defeat.
Though Pikes Peak is often mentioned in the same breath as the Isle of Man TT, the public-road race in the middle of the Irish Sea features a longer course that also happens to wind through crowded towns. There's even genuine wheel-to-wheel competition. Though death visits the TT practically every year, a motorcyclist hasn't died in the Race to the Clouds at Pikes Peak since 1982. That streak was broken this year, when Bobby Goodin crashed at the finish line. He clocked a 11:07.114, good enough for fourth place in the Middleweight class. The 54-year-old Texas man succumbed to injuries sustained in the wreck. And while the event was tragic, we're sure he would've loved to have known that on his final motorcycle ride, he managed to beat Guy Martin to the top of Pikes Peak.
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To some, risking life and limb to race up a mountain for the chance at a small purse seems ludicrous. To hometown racers and international stars alike, it's an event fraught with meaning and packed with history. We caught up with Romain Dumas when he came off the hill. The Frenchman's taken both the Nürburgring 24 and Le Mans outright, and he's currently on Porsche's 919 squad. "Even after all my other wins," he explained, "to do it with your own team, with your own project, it's big."
Yes, it's big. Yet Pikes Peak still has a small-event, down-home feel that's far removed from the spectacle of big-league motorsport. It's a small thing, this major event. But it looms large in myth. Large enough for top-tier European drivers to come over to try their hand at it, and large enough for men to give their lives.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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