Pikes Peak International Hill Climb

I'm heading to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb with a group of friends. Doing some camping and drinking the night before at Pikes Peaking ski hill. I've heard awesome things about the race. Anyone else heading there this year? Or been there in the past?

 

For those who haven't been or heard of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb, it's a race up a Pikes Peak mountain (14,110ft). It a contest of speed and engineering. There are different catagories for different types of cars/truck/motorcycles/quads (www.ppihc.com). Here were the best 4 moments from the race.

1. Stupid spectator. A long break followed the first 4 or 5 cars. Apparently a spectator was out on the track and a driver had to swerve out of the way to not hit (or kill him) and ended up swerving into a tree. Alot of these drivers are sliding and drifting around every turn at around close to 60 mph so avoiding a person in the road is difficult to say the least. A pretty long delay to clean up the course and to make sure someone gives that guy a beating for being an idiot. To understand the stupidity of this person you got to be there. To not know a car is coming you have to be helen keller. I could hear alot of the cars all the way from the start line (4 miles away) from where we were. And to not see them, well I have no idea.

2. The Monster. It's called the monster because it is a monster (1000 hp suzuki) and it has it written on the vehicle, http://www.ppihc.com/detail.aspx?ca...ery.aspx?categoryid=6275&photomode=3&tabid=10. The car holds the record on the course at 10:01. This car is single handily made it worth it for me to attend this race. It's the fastest car I've seen in person. Does the course at an average speed of ~75 mph. Does not sound impressive, but you have realize there is not a single straight away and more than half the course is gravel switch back roads. If your near the course you get sprayed with gravel from it trying to gain traction after drifting through a turn on the course. It was an adrenaline rush that's hard to explain without being there.

3. Crash. During the motor cycle portion of the day, a bunch of riders near the turn we were situated at that had to slowly down and regain there balance to not go off the track. The motorcycles actually race against one another (4 or 5 at a time, while cars only go 1 at a time). So racers have to worry both about the turns of the course and the guy next to him. nearing the end of the motorcycle portion of the day, a racer finally looses traction and can't stop and ends up sliding his bike to a stop on his side near edge of a hair pin turn. He's fine but probably will be picking gravel out of this thigh and arm for a week. Pretty exciting seeing a motorcycle crash in person.

4. Flaming car. It raining pretty hard outside for ~15 mins, so the gravel road is slick and alot of cars you can see steam from the rain evaportating on contact when hitting the engine. Over the radio we hear fire, and not sure what it is, but soon find out when a car stalls out with a little flame coming from the engine right next to us. He gets his vehicle started back up and immediately a huge flame bursts out the back of his car. He keeps loosing power and isn't sure why so he drives off the course next to our camp and still is flaming pretty bad. My buddy tells him his car is on fire, but just suspects it's smoking from the rain, but after convincing him, he puts the first out and gets out of car quickly. It was pretty exciting. (apparently a seal broke on his turbo and started leaking oil. High temperatures and oil lead to pretty big fire.)

 

Sounds pretty cool!