Get Hyped For Pikes Peak With These Vintage Videos

Rally legend Ari Vatanen came to the mountain in 1988 with a hot car and a dream. If you haven’t seen Climb Dance yet, you owe it to yourself to watch this video for the next five minutes and 19 seconds, because it’s maybe the best piece of motorsport video in history. I remember when this thing was passed around on bootleg VHS tapes borrowed from your pals at the regional autocross. You know, before the internet.

Ever since I can remember I’ve been a fan of the Ruf brand. Taking Porsches and making them faster and better is maybe the greatest task one could dedicate their life to doing. This CTR looks like a lot of fun.

Let’s look at what it was like to race Pikes Peak in 1965 with this short documentary from the period.

Lexington doesn’t exist anymore, but the legacy of the brand’s victory at Pikes Peak in 1920 remains. With the road fully paved now, I bet you could run your family SUV up the mountain in less time than these racers took over 100 years ago.

Rod Millen took the top time at Pikes Peak five times in the 1990s driving for Toyota, and set a seemingly unbeatable record time there in 1994 when he took this Celica up at 10:04:06

To get a corner named after you at Pikes Peak, you have to be either really good, or do something really dumb. When Jeremy Foley went off in his Mitsubishi Evo in 2012, the corner was unofficially renamed “Evo Corner.” Legend has it you can still find 4G63 parts scattered around the landing zone.

Jeff Zwart has become somewhat synonymous with Pikes Peak. He’s won eight different class championships driving ten different Porsches over the course of 14 years. This video is my favorite of his cars, a totally wild build that paired a Porsche GT3 Cup car with an 800-horsepower turbocharged engine. It sounds like a demon released from hell, and goes like one, too.

Speaking of Jeff Zwart, his 2011 run up the hill was interesting because he was driving a bone stock brand-new Porsche 911 GT2 RS. He picked the car up from a dealership in Southern California, road tripped it to the mountain, and raced up it to set a new record. This whole project was so cool.

Old Smokey was once the fastest diesel-powered machine up the mountain. It suffered a brake failure last year and got smashed all to hell. What a cool truck. RIP, Smokey.

Pikes Peak is part of the legend of Walter Röhrl and the Audi Quattro. He won the race up the mountain in 1987 in dramatic fashion.

Motorcycles are no longer allowed at Pikes Peak because of Ducati rider Carlin Dunne’s fatal crash in 2019. It’s a damn shame, because bikes were some of the best racing on the mountain.

Volkswagen wasn’t fucking around when it brought the ID R out in 2018, aiming for, and succeeding in, grabbing the outright PPIHC record. That time of 07:57.148, like all records before it, seems impossible to beat. But maybe it can be.

Michèle Mouton and Audi brought a level of professionalism to the hillclimb in 1985 that hadn’t been seen before. While most of the previous winners were running tube frame yard karts with big motors in them, Audi showed up in 1985 aiming for the win, and getting it.

Look at the difference between Mouton’s car in 1985 and the giant wings Röhrl had just two years later. Incredible.

Loeb is maybe the greatest of all time in rallying, and everyone knew that when he brought his Peugeot out to run at Pikes Peak in 2013 that it would smash the standing record. The course was fully paved in 2011 and this was the first real professional attempt at a record since, all but guaranteeing it. Over a decade later and it’s still the fastest gas-powered car to ever run at Pikes.

Ken Block’s Climbkhana was obviously not filmed during a hillclimb event, but it is a perfect distillation of Block’s career as a racing driver. It’s a damn shame his Hoonipigasus wasn’t ready for prime time in 2023, because we never got to see the man run flat out in a fast car. This is the best we got, and damn if it isn’t great.