(this is a very large file to download (66mb) do not download unless you have a fast Internet connection. Right click on the link and select..."save target as" save it on your desktop so you can find it. LOL... Enjoy.....this is one of my all time favorite videos.)
http://carfreaks.b0nk.net/Course%20de%20Pikes%20Peak%20(Ari%20Vatanen).mpg
Climb Dance
Hill climbing is very much a minority motor sport in the UK. Despite its depth of history, names such as Shelsley Walsh, Prescott and Gurston Down mean little to the average F1 fan, let alone the man in the street. Specialist constructors like Pilbeam barely register a blip on the general motorsport consciousness and meeting reports are generally buried on the back pages of Motorsport News or Autosport. It’s a shame really, as hill climbing is one of the most inclusive and friendly branches of motorsport, with cars from near standard small sports cars up to the highly specialised Pilbeam’s etc. running at the same meetings on the same piece of tarmac – its equivalent to finding a Westfield race on the same bill as a Grand Prix. It’s a very British way of going about your motorsport and its essence remains the same as decades ago, the sport unsullied by extensive commercialisation.
Unsurprisingly, they do things slightly differently in the States. Hill climbing there is, well, altogether bigger for a start. It helps that they have some serious hills for a start! There’s no running up the tarmac drives of Stately Homes in America with times measured in seconds. No, in the States fast times are measured in minutes as they race to the top of BIG mountains on generally lose surfaces. It’s closer to special stage rallying, except that instead of super technical, trick diff road car conversions it is dominated by some seriously powerful, very raw, fire breathing specials. In the whole of the US, one hill above all is the big one, the one to win – Pikes Peak.
Pikes Peak is an American motorsport institution, situated in the Colorado mountains. For the Pikes Peak hill climb all manner of petrol heads descend on one of the most spectacular looking motorsport locations anywhere, not only from America but even some from overseas. Everything from quad bikes to the specials and even huge trucks tackle the climb and while it is the home built specials and locally rally cars that dominate the times now it wasn’t always the way. It’s not too long ago that Pikes Peak was considered important enough by the European manufacturers that full blown works entries were launched up the hill, most spectacularly by Peugeot. Luckily for us, Peugeot had the foresight to record their attempts for posterity and so was born one of the finest motorsport adrenalin rush movies ever made – Climb Dance.
But that’s getting ahead of the story a little. The European manufacturers involvement in Pikes Peak stemmed from the end of the Group B formula in rallying. These seriously scary rally cars had been banished from the sport after a number of high profile accidents, most notably the death of Henri Toivonen in a Lancia Delta S4 on the Tour of Corsica rally where a bad accident became a fatality as a direct result of “rocket fuel” petrol and magnesium alloy car parts. Suddenly, competitive manufacturers such as Ford, Audi and most notably Peugeot found themselves with cars to race and nowhere to race them. Ford and Audi took them off to Pikes Peak, whereas at first Peugeot took theirs off to the deserts of Africa for the Paris-Dakar rally, then an even more high profile event than it is today. With a modified and lengthened 205 T16 Group B rally car, Peugeot left Paris for the 1987 event and arrived in Dakar victorious on their first attempt at the rally. Peugeot was delighted, they suddenly had a new competitive outlet for their cars in the emergent rally “raid” events, longer, tougher and more extreme than the traditional gravel and tarmac rallies that made up the World Rally Championship.
Yesterday was to learn
and tomorrow will be the consequence of what I can do today.
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