Racing improves the breed. That is a known truth in both horse and automotive racing. I have long maintained the best way to improve and market electric cars is to race them. It looks like Volkswagen has heard my pleas, because they’ve just rolled out this nasty looking, all-electric race car to have a crack at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.
Fearless Few
The Pikes Peak race, for those of you bereft of this knowledge, is one of the last “You’re going to die!! You’re crazy!!” racing events on the planet. It’s a twelve-and-a-half mile “Race To The Clouds” with a finishing line over 14,000 feet. There are sections of the run that are crazy, Glen Cove and The Ws, and then there are the sections of the run that are borderline suicidal: The Devil’s Playground, Bottomless Pit, etc. You get those turns wrong, and by the time your wreckage stops bouncing your clothes will be out of style. You need confidence and skill and a great amount of bravery to take this place on. And those who have, and succeeded, have all three of those in large quantities; racers like Unser (literally the entire family) and Walter Rohrl and Ari Vatanen and Michelle Mouton and Sébastien Loeb. Loeb, arguable the greatest rally driver of all time, holds the outright course record at Pikes Peak. Volkswagen has the idea that they should hold, if not the outright record, then at least the EV record.
Photo: Volkswagen of America, Inc.
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