Sports car racing veteran Romain Dumas continued to expand his résumé as a hill climb racer, too, by winning his fifth overall title at the 102nd running of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Once again, he did it in an EV, but not without a challenging beginning.
The Frenchman, who still holds the all-time Pikes Peak record of 7m57.148s set in an electric Volkswagen ID.R in 2018, overcame a slow start due to a technical issue with his Ford F-150 Lightning SuperTruck to complete the 12.42-mile route to the summit of “America’s mountain” in 8m53.563s. That was enough to best the second-fastest time, set by Unlimited class winner Christian Merli, by nearly 11 seconds. Merli ran a 9m04.454s with his Wolf Aurobay GB08 2.0 HP..
“The run was very difficult,” recounted Dumas. “I don’t know what happened at the start — the car just switched off completely on its own, it never happened before. I didn’t panic, I just looked at the numbers and everything was looking OK, I made a power cycle on my own and was able to restart. On the radio they were telling me there was a red flag, because I assume they saw that I was stopped on track, but I already restarted so I didn’t know if I should stop or not — there was a little bit confusion! At the first split I saw that I was 26 seconds slower compared to my provisional (time) so I knew that OK, I need just to push and it should be OK. But this is Pikes Peak, you cannot predict anything!”
Other class winners included Dani Sordo (Exhibition), at 9m30s.852s, Cole Powelson (Open Wheel) at 9m33.222s, David Donohue (Time Attack 1) at 9m49.029s and Laura Hayes (Pikes Peak GT4 Trophy by Yokohama) with a 1020.487s run.
Click here for full results.
Watch the winning run below.
