The outrageous mountain-climbers that became Pikes Peak legends

There’s nothing new about monsters visiting America’s Mountain. Since the 1800s, the good folk of Colorado Springs have talked about seeing Bigfoot wandering along the sides of Pikes Peak. Today, there’s even a sign warning motorists of a particular spot where the elusive creature likes to cross the road.

But for one day each year, the big hairy beast is nowhere to be seen on the Pikes Peak Highway. One Sunday every summer, Bigfoot spotting is cast aside in favour of the mountain’s real monsters as the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb gets under way. The 12.42-mile road runs from the startline at 9390 feet and rises through 156 corners to the summit at 14,115 feet. That’s three Ben Nevises piled high, with two thirds of a Snowdon on top. It’s a long way up, but it’s a journey that has captivated motorsport followers for more than 100 years.

Mining mogul Spencer Penrose was looking for a way to publicise the toll road he’d engineered, installed and opened from the bottom to the top of the mountain in 1916. The best way? A race. And with that, the world’s most famous hillclimb was born. An astonishing $2000 purse was on offer for the winner, along with the biggest and, at the time, most valuable silver trophy (the Penrose Trophy, naturally) in world motorsport.

That first event was won with a home-built car on wooden wheels powered by an aeroplane engine. Pikes Peak captured the imagination and has continued to do so ever since, becoming the US’s first ever nationally televised race in 1964. That engineering free rein remains today, and offers manufacturers real appeal to build a car to win the race to the clouds.

One of the biggest changes for the event came in 1984, when a rally category was included for the first time. Audi spotted the potential for more North American publicity for its all-conquering quattro and sent Michele Mouton to take on the Unsers – the ‘royal family’ of Pikes Peak – and their V8s.

Early Pikes Peak racers were fairly rudimentary before the arrival of 4WD supercars changed the game

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Until then, the car of choice had mainly been a single-seater constructed from the lightest material possible and powered by as much displacement as you could find. American car builder John Wells was an early master of this seemingly straightforward style of engineering, with his Coyote the car to beat for more than a decade; in 1984, Mouton finished second to Bill Brister in one of Wells’s cars. But both might have been shaded by a typically flat-chat Martin Schanche, had his four-wheel-drive MkIII Ford Escort not suffered a front puncture.

After 1984, everything changed. Four-wheel drive became a fundamental requirement on what was still a gravel road. Audi dominated for the next three years with increasingly powerful evolutions of the quattro and ever-wilder wings at either end of the car.

PLUS: The Group B pioneer that transformed rallying forever

Mouton won for Audi in 1985, prompting a 52-year-old Bobby Unser out of retirement to take a 10th victory on the hill in 1986 with a quattro. Walter Rohrl completed the hat-trick in an E2 now sporting a huge cooling duct in the roof feeding air into the rear-mounted radiators. The German’s success was doubly satisfying given that he set a new course record of 10m47.850s and beat a trio of Peugeot 205 T16s. Rohrl was one of three drivers to beat the 11-minute mark for the first time in 1987.

"It was always the challenge. Of course, for Audi, it was big promotion in America to take on this famous race and beat the local guys. Winning Pikes Peak has always been a big thing, something for the manufacturers to talk about" Michele Mouton

With Group B banned from the World Rally Championship, Peugeot and Audi revelled in the competition Pikes Peak offered. Having seen its 205 beaten, Peugeot Sport redoubled its efforts – and its million-pound budget – a year on. The 405 T16 had been born with the Dakar Rally in mind, but an evolution of the car, complete with four-wheel steering and 600bhp, weighed in to Colorado at 900kg. Ari Vatanen didn’t miss this time, winning the 1988 event and besting Rohrl’s previous course record by half a second.

“That car was incredible,” recalled the Finn. “It was so powerful. Of course, it had come after a dark time in my life [Vatanen feared he had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion after almost being killed at Rally Argentina in 1985], and driving in Pikes Peak and on Dakar was like a release for me. I was coming out of the darkness. It was a big fight with Audi at the time. The cars were like monsters, they were getting faster and faster all the time with more and more downforce.”

Vatanen’s 1988 victory is captured in one of motorsport’s most famous films, Climb Dance.

“Ah, this film,” smiled Vatanen. “Always, people are remembering this film.”

Vatanen lost out to Rohrl in 1987, but couldn't be stopped in 1988 with Peugeot 405 Turbo 16 made famous by the Climb Dance movie

Photo by: DPPI

Because Pikes Peak Hillclimb takes place on a stretch of toll road, one of the stipulations from the local authorities is that the race is run early in the day, so that tourists can use the road for what Penrose had initially intended it: to get a better view of America.

“This is the reason for that time in the film when I have my hand off the wheel – I am keeping the sun from my eyes,” continued Vatanen. “It was so early in the morning, the sun was just coming up over the mountains. Sometimes when people are asking me for the selfie, they are asking, ‘Ari, Ari, can you put up your arm like in Climb Dance?’”

Pikes Peak is just as susceptible to the ebb and flow of manufacturers as events such as the Dakar Rally or Le Mans 24 Hours. When Group B departed, it allowed the open-wheeled racers to come back, but it was Kiwi Rod Millen and his increasingly crazy Toyota Celicas who would win five from six events between 1994 and 1999. Using the engine from Toyota’s Super GT Supra JGTC, the Millen machine managed the perfect power-to-weight ratio of 1bhp for each kilogram. And those 880 horses hauled him closer than ever to the sub-10-minute mark.

The first person to take the summit in a time starting with a nine was charismatic Japanese racer Nobuhiro Tajima. Known as ‘Monster’ partly because of his size and partly because of his attacking style of driving, he’s known and loved in Colorado Springs. Tajima was a Suzuki man through and through – it was his team that carried the Japanese manufacturer to three Junior World Rally Championship titles. An ill-fated step up to the main class delivered the SX4 WRC, which lasted a little over a season before the plug was pulled.

But still, ‘Monster’ knew a thing or two about how to make cars work on gravel. Not that this was as important as it once was at the American classic – in 2002, the owners of the toll road decided they would pave it section by section, with the aim of having an all-asphalt 12.42 miles by 2012. A year before that, and with 76% of the course covered in Tarmac, Tajima blasted his heavily modified SX4 up the hill in 9m51.278s. For many, the madness of ‘Monster’ is better captured by the twin-engined Suzukis he used through the 1990s.
But what is it that keeps people coming back and building crazy cars to take to the clouds?

“It was always the challenge,” says Mouton. “Of course, for Audi, it was big promotion in America to take on this famous race and beat the local guys. Winning Pikes Peak has always been a big thing, something for the manufacturers to talk about.”

That was certainly the case for Peugeot in 2013. To commemorate a quarter of a century since Climb Dance, Peugeot and Red Bull joined forces to develop the 208 T16 Pikes Peak. Like Millen’s Toyotas, it would feature the perfect power to weight, with 850 kilos and horsepower. Powering the Peugeot was a Sodemo-built 3.2-litre V6 twin-turbo engine similar to the one found driving Courage race cars at Le Mans. That wasn’t the only link to the Circuit de la Sarthe – the monstrous rear wing on the 208 was lifted directly from Peugeot’s 908.

Charismatic Tajima was the first to dip under the 10-minute barrier in his Suzuki SX4

Photo by: Motorsport Images

With the car done, only the driver was to be decided. Nine-time world champion Sebastien Loeb had just retired from his full-time WRC commitments and was ready to take on new challenges. This one had his name on it. Asked for his thoughts after his first look at the 12.42 miles in question, Loeb smiles.

“I think,” he says, “it’s best to keep the car in the middle of the road.” He did that for 8m13.878s, smashing the record by more than a minute and a half. “I attacked it hard,” says Loeb, “and I really felt I drove well. I was all the time in the middle of the road, trying not to slide, to keep the car neat. Everything was good.”

More than that. The man whose record he’d beaten – Rhys Millen, son of Rod – was confident history had been made by the Peugeot. “I don’t think we’ll ever see that time beaten,” offered the New Zealander.

One of the biggest barriers to performance at Pikes Peak is the lack of oxygen as the course climbs. The thinking is that a forced-induction engine loses 3% of its power for every 1000 feet it rises above sea level. With power already depleted at the 9000-foot start, internal combustion units are considerably more breathless by the time the chequered flag is unfurled at the finish. The answer is electric…

Had the timescale allowed, Demaison would have created his own bespoke chassis and taken the project even further – the time would, and he firmly believed could, have been even better

Certainly, that was Volkswagen’s approach when the I.D. R was first mooted in 2018. A Norma chassis was converted to accept a pair of power units, one on each axle and a big battery capable of generating 500kW and 671bhp. After winning three of the previous four Pikes Peaks, Frenchman Romain Dumas was the ideal candidate to drive the car. But what was possible? Typically, Volkswagen talked down the potential for eclipsing Loeb’s petrol-engined benchmark and instead set its sights on Rhys Millen’s electric best of 8m57.118s.

Early practice suggested that wouldn’t be a problem. But what about the extra 44 seconds to get to the course record? On the morning of the Dumas run in 2018, one Pikes Peak official offered the sort of matter-of-fact assessment only available to a veteran of the event.

“He doesn’t decide the time,” he said. “Nobody decides. The mountain decides. If the mountain smiles on that car today, then maybe he can do it. But if it don’t, if it gives him the weather or the wildlife or anything else it can throw, then he ain’t got a hope.

Many thought WRC legend Loeb's record in the Peugeot 208 T16 Pikes Peak would never be beaten - but Volkswagen had other ideas

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“That’s what makes this place so special. There’s not many events in the world right now when it’s just you against the hill, the mountain in such extreme conditions. It’s what? High fifties [fahrenheit, 14 degrees Celsius] down here right now? What is it up top? It’s a hell of a lot less, and that chance of rain down here… that’s a chance of snow up there. It’s this kind of adventure that brings folk back here year on year. It’s this that makes the manufacturers want to come and show that they have a better car, a faster car. It’s one of the great remaining adventures.”

He’s not wrong. Pikes Peak is an incredible adventure and one that is still wide open to the imagination. The unlimited class really still means something in Colorado. And Dumas? He did it. Volkswagen Motorsport did it. And they didn’t just do it a little bit: Dumas absolutely smashed Loeb’s record, lifting 16 and a half seconds out of Peugeot’s previous best.

And that wasn’t the best of it. Francois-Xavier Demaison, now the Williams F1 technical director, was the brains behind the I.D. R four years ago. Had the timescale allowed, he would have created his own bespoke chassis and taken the project even further – the time would, and he firmly believed could, have been even better. Then again, less than 30 minutes after Dumas crossed the line victorious, the snow arrived and forced the organisers to cancel the later runs. The mountain – and, no doubt, its very own monster – had indeed smiled down on Dumas.

Dumas set course record with Volkswagen I.D. R in 2018

Photo by: Volkswagen