Pikes Peak International Hill Climb: The Race to the Clouds
The starting line sits at roughly 9,390 feet above sea level, higher than the summit of almost any mountain in the eastern United States. From there, the road climbs another 4,700 feet or so through 156 corners before it runs out of mountain at 14,115 feet, the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado. Competitors get one timed run. There is no second lap, no chance to learn from a mistake on the previous tour. The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, universally known as the Race to the Clouds, has been asking drivers to solve that problem since 1916, which makes it the second-oldest motor race in the United States after the Indianapolis 500.
A race born of a road
The event owes its existence to Spencer Penrose, a Colorado Springs entrepreneur who had converted the old carriage road up Pikes Peak into the Pikes Peak Highway. Penrose needed a way to convince the public that a road to the top of a fourteener was more than a curiosity, so in 1916 he organized a hill climb and put up a trophy that still bears his name. The first winner, Rea Lentz, wrestled a crude open-wheeler up the gravel road in a little under 21 minutes, a time that would be almost tripled in speed by the machines of a century later. The mountain itself carries the name of Zebulon Pike, the explorer who surveyed the region in the early 1800s and famously never reached the summit himself. The race quickly became an institution, interrupted only by the World Wars, and it turned the mountain into a proving ground that manufacturers, privateers and outright dreamers have been drawn to ever since.
Twelve and a half miles, 156 corners
The competitive course measures 12.42 miles, just a fraction under 20 kilometers, and every one of its 156 corners has its own character. The lower section winds through pine forest, relatively fast and flowing, with the trees offering at least a psychological sense of containment. Around halfway, near the area known as Glen Cove, the character changes: the trees thin and then disappear entirely as the road crosses the treeline. The upper mountain is a different world, a series of switchbacks cut into open alpine tundra, with gradients that average around 7 percent and drop-offs that in many places have no guardrail at all. Sections with names like the Ws, Devil's Playground and Boulder Park are spoken of by competitors with the same reverence rally drivers reserve for the great stages of Finland or Corsica. A mistake at the bottom means a damaged car. A mistake near the top can mean a fall of hundreds of feet.
The thin-air problem
What separates Pikes Peak from every circuit race and almost every other hill climb is the air itself. At the summit the atmosphere holds roughly a third less oxygen than at sea level. A naturally aspirated engine that starts the run healthy will lose a substantial share of its power by the finish, gasping in the thin air exactly where the driver needs it most. Drivers suffer too: reaction times dull, concentration frays, and some competitors have used supplemental oxygen to stay sharp. For decades the answer was forced induction, with turbochargers cramming the thin air back to something like sea-level density. This is also why the mountain would eventually become the perfect showcase for electric power, since an electric motor produces exactly the same output at 14,000 feet as it does at the seaside. The mountain does not merely test speed; it tests the fundamental chemistry of how a vehicle makes power.
Gravel days and rally invaders
For most of its history the road to the summit was gravel, and the race rewarded the sideways, improvised car control of dirt-track and rally specialists. The local royalty were the Unsers, a family from the region whose members won on the mountain so often across the decades that it was jokingly called their private property; Bobby Unser alone took more than a dozen victories before going on to win the Indianapolis 500. In the 1980s the mountain went global. Michèle Mouton brought an Audi Quattro and in 1985 became the first woman to win outright, setting a course record in the process. Walter Röhrl answered for Audi in 1987 with the wild Sport Quattro S1, and in 1988 Ari Vatanen hurled a Peugeot 405 T16 up the gravel in a run immortalized by the short film Climb Dance, perhaps the most famous piece of hill-climb footage ever shot, complete with Vatanen shielding his eyes from the sun with one hand while steering with the other.
Asphalt and the fall of the ten-minute wall
Rod Millen defined the 1990s, and his 10:04 run in a Toyota Celica in 1994 stood as the benchmark for over a decade, agonizingly close to the ten-minute barrier that seemed almost mythical on the mixed surface. Then the surface itself changed. Following a lawsuit over gravel erosion into the surrounding watershed, the road was progressively paved, and from 2011 the race was run entirely on asphalt. That same year Nobuhiro Monster Tajima, the Suzuki stalwart who had made the Unlimited class his personal fiefdom, finally broke ten minutes. The asphalt era rewrote the engineering brief: slick tires, enormous downforce and circuit-style precision replaced gravel improvisation. In 2013 Peugeot returned with Sébastien Loeb, the nine-time world rally champion, and a purpose-built 208 T16. Loeb's 8:13.878 did not merely break Tajima's record, it demolished it by well over a minute and was widely described as one of the great individual drives in modern motorsport.
Electricity conquers the clouds
Loeb's mark looked untouchable until Volkswagen arrived in 2018 with the ID.R, a featherweight electric prototype designed for exactly one purpose. With Romain Dumas driving, a man who had already won on the mountain multiple times in conventional machinery, the ID.R stopped the clocks at 7:57.148, the first and so far only sub-eight-minute run in the event's history. The electric drivetrain was not a gimmick; it was the logical answer to the altitude problem that had defined the race for a century. Electric and hybrid entries have since become a fixture of the entry list, and manufacturers treat the mountain as a laboratory where a single Sunday in June can prove more about a powertrain than a season of circuit racing. The record run reframed the whole event: the question is no longer whether electric cars can compete at Pikes Peak, but whether anything else can beat them there.
Danger, weather and respect
The mountain has never let anyone forget the stakes. Weather on the upper sections can lurch from sunshine to hail, fog or even snow within an hour, in the middle of June, and organizers routinely shorten runs when the summit closes in. Competitors and course workers have lost their lives across the event's long history, and the death of motorcycle racer Carlin Dunne near the finish in 2019 led organizers to drop the motorcycle program that had been part of the race for generations. Modern editions run cars only, across classes from near-showroom machines in the Pikes Peak Open to the anything-goes Unlimited category. Yet danger has never diminished the event's pull, and each June the road closes, the timing gear goes up, and another field of entrants lines up at 9,390 feet to bargain with the mountain.
Explore on the map
Pikes Peak is a singular venue, but it belongs to a worldwide family of hill climbs, circuits and speedways that each tell their own story. You can find the mountain itself, along with thousands of other motorsport locations on every continent, on our interactive map. Zoom into Colorado to trace the road from the start line to the summit, then browse outward and discover which legendary venues are closest to you.