Motorsports: 2012 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb Preview

The 2012 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, America’s second oldest race, kicks off its 90th running this Sunday August 12th.   And the TFLcar team is on location in beautiful Colorado Springs, CO providing coverage of the festivities and the race itself.  This is a very unique and demanding race with a course that stretches 12.42 miles with 156 turns that begins at 9,390 feet and finishes at the 14,110 foot summit of America’s Mountain.  This course is Colorado’s version of  Germany’s Nurburgring “Green Hell”.   Competitors are faced with major challenges, such as: the unpredictable and constantly changing high altitude weather and the fact that each driver gets only one chance to run the complete course at full speed and this chance comes on race day.  Qualifying runs are done using sections of the course.

There are a total of 186 competitors divided into 16 classes who dare to challenge the Mountain this year.  This total includes 97 competitors who are racing on two wheels in 5 motorcycle classes.  The most competitive car division is the Time Attack class with 25 entries.  This class allows production based close-bodied two and four wheel drive vehicles and does not limit the size of the engine.

This year, the charge up the Mountain is lead by the entry from the Banks-Dallenbach team in the Unlimited Class.   They took pole position after Friday qualifying, and earned the right to choose their starting time for Sunday’s race.  This number 98 car, owned by Leonard and Judy Arnold, uses a Methanol injected twin turbo V8 motor with a high-tech automatically adjusted turbo boost control system thanks to the engineers at bankspower.com  This motor is putting out a mighty 1,400 horsepower and gives a serious workout to the trans-axle and and the rear tires.  Paul Dallenbach is the highly experienced racer behind the wheel.

See the following 2012 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb Preview video.