P92
FEATURE I PIKES PEAK HILLCLIMB REVISITED
taken a bottle of water onto a plane and seen how
it squishes in on itself the higher you go? That's
what happens to your tires at Pikes Peak.
To get to the top, you know you've done some-
thing very few people in this world have done.
And that is an incredible feeling.
Pikes Peak will
always have a special
place in American motorcycle racing, but
its time is most certainly done. It will never
again see a rider take the checkered flag,
there will never be another celebratory burn
-
out, and there will never be another rider
popping the cork
on a winner's champagne.
It's easy to be sad it's over. Carlin Dunne loved the
mountain like no other, and I know he would have
been mortified that his death caused the end of an
event his name was synonymous with.
A better way to look at the Pikes Peak Interna
-
tional Hill Climb is to not be sad it's over but to be
happy it happened.
CN
of corner you could think of and billiard-smooth
pavement on which to maximize turn speed and
to get on the gas as hard as you dared.
The middle section, consisting of 10 hairpins
one after the other from Glen Cove to Devil's
Playground, suited the drag racers, as you'd get
around each dead slow corner, fire it to
the next and repeat. This was the section
in which Dunne was near unbeatable.
And the final section, from Devil's Play
-
ground to The Summit, was all about eye-
watering speed. How
bad do you want
it? How hard are you prepared to push it?
Every corner at Pikes Peak can kill you, but none
put the fear into you like the last third of the track.
The joke was if you went off the mountain, you'd
die of starvation before they found you.
By this stage, you're over 13,000 feet high, the
engine is gasping for oxygen (just like the rider),
and the altitude is delaminating your tires. Ever
Racers line up,
ready for the mass
start in 1954. By
1991, saner heads
prevailed, and the
race was turned
into a time trial.
