Twin's Peak
TWIN'S PEAK
RACE WATCH
Team BMW tackles The Race to the Clouds
ALLAN GIRDLER
TWO CENTURIES AGO, LT. ZEBULON PIKE, ASSIGNED BY PRESIdent Thomas Jefferson to explore the Rockies, sighted the mountain that now bears his name. He was impressed and intimidated to the extent that in his official report, Pike said the peak “would never be conquered by man.”
He was, of course, wrong, blindsided by his times and technology, which is why two centuries later we are celebrating not just getting to the top but seeing who can get there fastest in the form of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, known in the guidebooks as The Race to the Clouds.
It’s a famous venue, second in age in the U.S. only to the Indy 500 and arguably the most famous hillclimb in the world.
There’s another factor here. Because the hillclimb is famous and unique, it’s been a good way to market a product, to let the buying public know who walks and who talks.
As in? The Colorado Springs newspaper the day before the event had an article about one Nobuhiro Tajima and his custom-built Suzuki XL7, which in practice and qualifying looked good to break the course’s 13-year-old record. The reporter talked to local Suzuki dealers and they said, heck yes, if we break the record, people will know and they’ll come look at our cars and maybe buy one (never mind that the XL7 in the climb was like an XL7 on the showroom floor the way Jeff Gordon’s NASCAR ride is like a Monte Carlo).
Meanwhile, parked in front of race HQ is a trio of Volkswagen Touaregs in race paint but wearing license plates. Seems VW wants to let people know the Touareg is one powerful family-style SUV, so they’re here to run for a class record.
And in the motorcycle pits, there’s a row of Honda CRF150Rs. That maker hopes to show the riding public that little bikes can perform, so they’re here to run in the Exhibition class.
And out of the trailer comes the main reason we’re here: a fleet of BMW HP2 Megamotos.
Pikes Peak is kind of like Bonneville, a world of its own. The actual mountain is owned by the federal government and is a national forest. The road from the boundary to the top of the mountain-the hillclimb course on race day and a tourist destination the rest of the year-is owned by the city of Colorado Springs. The city, in turn, leases the road each year to the Pikes Peak Auto Hill Climb Educational Museum, a non-profit organization backed by the city and tourist attractions and business interests, as well as by local racers and fans.
The event itself was begun in 1916 by a gold-mine owner who built a hotel and wanted publicity. The race became part of the American open-wheel championship and ran motorcycle classes and stock-car classes when there was demand.
There are strict technical rules for the machines and operators, while the class structure is pretty much what the race group wants them to be.
When Indycars raced here, there was a class for Indycars. When NASCAR was going national and the ohv V-Eight was news, there was a division and records and advertising based on stock-car classes.
Which is why and how the rally-style Suzuki runs in the Unlimited division and why and how the VWs are in High Performance Super Stock, and why the BMWs are in the 1200 class.
The 1200 motorcycle class is new in 2007, and it’s in the rulebook because in 2006 BMW Motorrad Motorsport, the maker’s sport division, came to Pikes Peak with an R1200GS. BMW hired Casey Yarrow, a Pro flat-track and supermoto rider, entered the GS in the Exhibition class and won.
There’s a lot of interest in the notion of the big sporting Twin, the machine that’s styled after supermoto but with more power and with the capability of going most anywhere, if not actually off trail or path or road. There are examples from BMW, Ducati, K.TM, Buell and so forth. And last year, the BMW did so well in the climb that the PPAHCEM decided to create a class for 1200cc twin-cylinderpowered motorcycles.
BMW entered in force. Yarrow was joined by Gary Trachy, who last year won the 500cc class on a Husqvarna; Greg Tracy, ditto for the 750cc class last year and Supermoto 500 the year before that; Mickey Dymond, the former AMA 125cc motocross champion who has taken a couple of AMA titles in Supermoto; Marcus Barth, a German endurance racer; and two guys riding for BMW dealers who wanted to back the program.
The Team BMW men were cheerful about what looked like more than enough investment. The best scenario, they said, would be to successfully compete against the competition, that is, to have Ducati and Aprilia and Buell and others show up with their mega/hyper/super/massive motos and watch BMW win.
Next best would be to have the rivals in class show up and show up the Beemers, as in a fair race that BMW lost. Such a result would attract attention to the class and spark interest and more involvement, which would be good for everyone, just as Harley vs. Triumph used to fill the stands in dirt-track.
And if nobody else entered, if BMWs swept the field, well, that would be the fault of Buell and Ducati, not BMW. However the actual racing would turn out, BMW was confident.
The hillclimb begins at 9390 feet above sea level and goes right to the top of the peak-14,110 or 14,115 or 14,140 feet, depending on whether you believe the program, the tablet at the summit or the data on the GPS map. The course is part pavement, part dirt. Some of the pavement is new and smooth, some of it is old and rough. Some dirt is graded and smooth, some has ruts and holes. It’s 12.42 miles long, average grade 7 percent, with sweepers and switchbacks and countless places a racer could go over the edge.
Consensus this year was that there was more pavement than there had been last year, which would help the big bikes. Plus, as the guidebook says, the top of Pikes Peak is about as high as you can get in the continental U.S. and still have your feet on the ground. That high, the air has only 40 percent of the oxygen it has at sea level, which eats power and makes carburetor tuning nearly impossible.
But the R1200GS HP2 has fuel-injection, which the book says is impervious to altitude changes. And because the closest other venue to this hillclimb is supermoto, the team BMWs were Megamotos fitted with 17-inch wheels and a rider’s choice of Metzeler tires, some nearly slick and others semi-knobby, whichever they thought would work best.
Beyond that, all the BMWs had Akrapovic exhausts, and the headlights were replaced with faux light decals, realistic enough to stop a deer in its tracks. Turnsignals and mirrors and taillights were removed, as the rules require, but the HP2s were as close to stock as a race machine can get.
The actual hillclimb is such a logistical nightmare that involvement requires dedication. Racers, workers and fans must all leap from bed at 4 a.m. to leave at 4:30 to go through the gate at 5 and be up the hill by 6 when the entrance and stages are closed, all this so everyone is in place when the first racer leaves the line at 9. Four-wheelers run one at a time, while motorcycles run in groups, two, three or five depending on qualifying times. Most years, the racing will be done by 1 p.m., and then all the racers come down the hill in a big parade, then the workers and then the fans, so it’s another two or three hours getting off the mountain. We’re talking nine to 12 hours here, for a hundred or so racers at speed for 20 minutes max, and all anyone can see is part of the course.
There were no complaints, in fact all were so unified that 15,000 people left behind, by this reporter’s observation, one beer can.
Try that at your next Raiders game. The results?
Scenario number three. The 1200cc class was seven BMWs, the HP2 squad. Class winner was Trachy, timed at 11 minutes, 46 seconds, coincidentally the same time in which he won the 500cc class last year.
But the fastest motorcycle time was 11:41, turned by Davey Durelle, a semiretired AMA Grand National rider on a big Rotax Single, running in 750cc Pro. So sometimes, experience with speed-flattrack miles are faster than any supermoto-works better than sheer power.
Anyway, Yarrow, at 11:49, was second and Dymond, 11:52, came third in an allBMW class sweep, and all three BMWs were quicker than the other bikes in the contest, Durelle, of course, excepted.
Puzzle of the day? There was one Buell on the mountain, a Super TT. By a layman’s reading of the rules, he should have been in Pro 1200 but he ran the Exhibition class. He turned 16:41, so perhaps he was happy where he was.
Elsewhere, the Vintage class is odd in that it permits only vintage Twins, 650 to 750cc. No Brit 500s, no Open-class Harleys or Indians. Winner this year, as in the previous year, was the irrepressible Eddie Mulder, on his Triumph 750, at 13:23, 9 seconds faster than his previous record and faster than the slower two BMW Megamotos, in case anyone wants to bench race.
Just for the record, the flock of little Hondas ran in the 15s, all with that foolishly grinning flair of grown men on small bikes.
The VW Touaregs, twin-turbocharged V-lOs weighing in at 5300 pounds ready to race, swept the HPSS class, as they were the only entries, running in the 13s and looking heavy.
And at the end of the day, it was Tajima and his Suzuki with a new record, 10 minutes and 1 second.
As noted, the old record had stood for 13 years. Further, the man who set it, a Pro New Zealand rally driver, said then, and since, and on the day before this year’s race, that his time could not be conquered by man.
But here came Tajima, and I don’t care if you were there for bikes or not, the Suzuki rally car was a four-wheel arrow, rocket-straight then pitched like a flattrack miler, catching the inside of each apex just so, no wild slides and no lost motion or power. It was man and machine at their best.
Lt. Pike would have been the first to shake Tajima’s hand.
For additional photography from Pikes Peak, visit www.cycleworld.com
