"I've been so bloody nervous for two days," said an elated Mark Lovell. "Yesterday, we only had one run and I was really down in the dumps. The guys worked all night trying to do the mapping and things. The guys did a brilliant job. It was the toughest 12 miles I've driven in my life. Bloody magic. Pikes Peak and a rookie win."
Lovell and co-driver Steve Turvey were the first British citizens to post a victory in the 80 runnings of the Falken Tire Pikes Peak International Hill Climb as the SCCA ProRally Championship made its first-ever points-scoring (Manufacturers Championship only) stop at the storied event.
"I can't believe it," said Turvey. "I'm absolutely delighted for us, but especially for the team. They've had such a run of bad luck, but they worked really hard, and it all came together at the last minute. Mark didn't put a foot wrong the whole way up."
Despite a puncture just two miles from the start, Hyundai's Paul Choiniere, who won the Open class at the 1997 Pikes Peak, finished second and Lauchlin O'Sullivan and Matt Chester finished third in the RMR Mitsubishi EVO 6.5.
"That was awful," said O'Sullivan. "I want to go back and do it again. The road was amazing. Third place. What a dream come true."
Team boss Rhys Millen put O'Sullivan in the team's back-up Open Class car as an 'atta-boy' for the good work he'd been doing driving the team's Group 2 car. Unfortunately for Millen, a four-time High Performance Showroom Stock PPIHC Champion, his new EVO VII lost fuel pressure at the start line and stalled there twice en route to a fifth-place finish.
"This is the happiest I've ever been," said Ramana Lagemann, who finished fourth by 0.08. "It's our first time here, we were underdogs and after hanging the front wheels off a cliff yesterday, I'm really happy to be at the summit."
A suspension change had caught Lagemann out at a most inopportune time during ProRally's lone test session and left his Subaru teetering on the brink of the aptly named Ragged Edge. "That's the first real turn in the top section. It's open, you're going in at high speeds and you've got to get the car turned in because it's loose. It's the first time you do that in this section and the change caught me off guard," says Lagemann.
Several nearby photographers and spectators were able to balance the car until a rescue truck could pull it off the edge.
"The drops here are no bigger than in Corsica," said Subaru teammate Lovell. "OK, we're a lot higher up and that's a shit of a long way down there," he added, looking over the edge. "But you don't think about it really. Although, I must admit as I passed Ramana's bend, it did pass through my mind not to hang it out too much. I probably dropped a half a second there."
The mountain can be cruel though. While Lovell's engine quit and Choiniere lost two turbos during the test session, the Tiburon of Mark Higgins and Michael Gibson performed flawlessly and hopes were high for the next day's race.
Co-driver Gibson gave this description of the test: "There's a thin margin here between really enjoying it and being scared. It's definitely a fantastic experience. We've looked over the edge of a few of them, but we don't think about it."
While Choiniere's co-driver Cindy Krolokowski "held on and smiled the whole way," the Group N winning co-driver, Julie Lin, found the road scary, even after therapy for acrophobia.
"The second part was a little intimidating," says Lin. "You need a lot of nerve to go through there, especially with all those blind sky views. During the race, the spectators were really good markers; when we saw them, we knew it was time to turn."
Adds Lin's husband and driver, Wolfgang Hoeck, "She was very happy when we made it to the top." Hoeck and Lin's EVO VII crossed the line two seconds ahead of Tim O'Neil and Ole Holter's WRX. Peter Workum and Alex Gelsomino were third, just ahead of Mark Cox and Jim Gill. In fact, only 37 seconds covered the entire Group N class over the 12.42-mile run.