"When I first saw the road, I said, 'This is wide, this will be easy,'" says Roger Freeman, Mark Lovell's co-driver while Steve Turvey is off for the season doing gravel notes for Richard Burns. "There's nothing further from the truth."
Lovell and Freeman were on their way to an outright win at the 81st running of the Falken Tire Pikes Peak International Hill Climb until the Mitsubishi of David Higgins broke a rear axle. His EVO's active center diff confused and overheating, Higgins was crawling along in first gear, roughly a third of the way up the mountain, when Lovell went past.
"I backed off quite a bit thinking, 'He's the main competition.' I lost my concentration, and made a complete mess of the next five corners," says the Team Subaru USA driver. We got near Glen Cove (roughly halfway) and I thought, 'Shit, we're not going near fast enough. We better hurry up. I had to think about my teammate.'"
Lovell and Freeman finished in 11:39.63, just 4.97 seconds behind 1993 and 2003 winner Paul Dallenbach's Open Wheel car. Teammates Ramana Lagemann and Michael Orr were second in ProRally Open, four seconds back and third quickest up the mountain.
Mitsubishi seems to have inherited Subaru's recent luck. Lauchlin O'Sullivan came to Colorado straight from his honeymoon nursing an ankle broken while climbing in the jungles near Puerto Vallarta. Higgins took 38 minutes to reach the top and the EVO of O'Sullivan and Christian Edstrom brushed a wall at Glen Cove and started spewing coolant at Devil's Playground, ending their run 800 yards shy of the summit.
Pikes Peak is an anomaly in the ProRally schedule in that practice for the single run up the mountain is allowed. The Open Class car got two runs on the lower half of the mountain after the traditional PPIHC classes finished Qualifying. Group N got its first look at the mountain the next day with a single run on the lower section before the Motorcycle Qualifying began. All the ProRally cars then practiced on the upper half of the mountain, with some cars managing to get in five runs.
Practice was relatively quiet. Higgins made only two runs and pronounced things good. Lovell had a couple of moments, though. He lost a turbo on his second run but was fastest again on his third.
The EVO 6.5 of Leon Styles and John Dillon spun a bearing during an early practice run, which sent Styles and his crew searching madly for parts. With no new parts available because 6.5s were never officially imported, the local dealer let them rummage through his dumpster with an engineer from the factory team. Using a crank from a spent Eclipse and used bearings, the engine's bottom end was hastily reassembled.
"We were basically told, 'It may last the hill, it may not.' About a mile up the hill, we lost oil pressure but didn't care. The mechanic had said if that happened, to ignore it," says Styles. "We just drove it to the top. What a rush. Fifth overall (in Open Class) with a dead car. We're pretty stoked."
He wasn't the only one. Doug Shepard, with Cindy Krolikowski co-driving, was back for his seventh attempt at the hill, running in Exhibition with his two-wheel-drive Group 5 Dodge SRT-4. "A Group 5 car beat all the four-wheel-drive N cars. I guess that shows the potential of the class," he says.
Last year, Wolfgang Hoeck, with wife Julie Lin co-driving, raised a few eyebrows with his win in Group N. Styles helped craft a set of blinders to help the acrophobic Lin concentrate on her notes and this year the pair won the class again, shaving 8 seconds off last year's time. Wyeth Gubelmann and Therin Pace were only 2 seconds back, followed by Shane Mitchell and Paul Donnelly.
Mark Utecht and Jeff Secor, the self-named 'Ballast Brothers,' found a nice Greek restaurant last year. Knowing they could be stuck on top of the mountain for a while, they tied their leftovers to the manifold and enjoyed a quick snack at the top. The only problem was opening the hood, technically an illegal service as the finish area is considered a control. This year with permission from the other competitors granted only if they brought enough for everyone along with a generous contribution from the restaurant, the pair cooked 3 pounds of meat on the way up the hill. It was a close call on the way to fourth place-they spun twice, once dropping the rear of the car over the edge, but lunch survived. Krolikowski brought a large salad and there were even Twinkies for dessert. Nothing quite like a nice barbecue at 14,000 feet.