Mike Ryan’s race team posted the video of their adventures from this year’s Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Mike drives a custom Frieghtliner race truck and is a Hollywood stunt driver and veteran truck racer. He was undoubtedly trying to set the big rig record now that the entire course has been paved.
The Toyota EV P002 electric race car is having an outstanding year so far. Germany based Toyota Motorsports Group Gmbh built the car based off a Radical open cockpit chassis. The EV P002 develops 900 Nm of torque (664 ft-lbs) and 350 kw of power (470 hp) from two axial flux “pancake” motors. It’s capable of holding 42 kwh of energy (almost twice the size of the Nissan Leaf battery pack) on board with lithium ceramic batteries.
EV West just posted the footage of the full Pikes Peak run of their 700 hp electric E36 BMW M3. It turns out their car was the first EV conversion to compete in the hill climb. They turned the power output down after they were getting a lot of power oversteer in qualifying. The result was a pretty clean and straight forward run up the mountain on race day. It was also pretty fast. They posted a time of 11:58.929 which was obviously the EV conversion record, but it was also good for fourth overall in the EV category.
Bradley Hasemeyer of Translogic got an interview in with Monster Tajima at this year’s Pikes Peak International Hill Climb before and after he attacked the mountain in his new E-Runner electric car in an attempt to set the new overall record. Tajima was the defending champion and was hoping to put an EV on top of the podium for the first running of the fully paved course. Unfortunately it was not meant to due to a motor failure on race day after qualifying well all weekend.
Source: Translogic
This year saw two factory backed Ducati Multistrada 1200’s break the 10 minute barrier at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The Ducati team chose to run the dual sport bikes even though the road surface was completely paved for the 2012 competition. The Multistrada engines are tuned for more torque to power out of the hairpins and the road surface is still pretty bumpy even though it’s been paved. Greg Tracy replied to one of the comments of this video saying that the upright seating position of the dual sport bikes are better at Pikes Peak because they allow you to adapt to changing conditions in turns faster. He went on to say that superbikes had too much weight committed to the front tire which can cause problems like we saw with the Yamaha R1. Tracy placed second in the motorcycle class with a 9’58.262″.