What it Means to Finish Pikes Peak + Results

Pikes Peak’s thin air punishes forced induction, which is why the 1969 Camaro known as Big Red traded its usual supercharged big-block for a naturally aspirated combination built just for the mountain. Another competitor drove his twin-turbo street Mustang nearly 3,600 miles round-trip simply to reach the starting line, then raced through goats and fog. Read on to see how two very different preparation strategies played out on the same 12.42-mile course.

Pikes Peak does not care what number is printed on your engine’s spec sheet. Somewhere above 9,000 feet the air thins out fast enough that forced induction, the very thing most modern high-horsepower builds lean on, starts working against itself. For one 1969 Camaro nicknamed for its size and its temper, that meant showing up to the 2017 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb with a completely different engine than the one it normally runs. For another driver in a street-driven twin-turbo Mustang, it meant dodging goats and fog on a public road just to reach the starting line. Both had a little over twelve miles of mountain to prove something. Which approach actually worked?

Big Red’s Two Personalities

RJ Gottlieb’s car, known as Big Red, is a 1969 Camaro that normally competes with a supercharged 598-cubic-inch big-block nicknamed The Elephant. That combination was built for top-speed and drag racing, where forced induction is an unambiguous advantage and dense sea-level air is always on tap. Pikes Peak asked something different of the car. The mountain’s altitude reduces air density enough that a supercharger’s advantage erodes the higher the course climbs, and a team that shows up with its usual setup is effectively racing an engine that gets weaker with every switchback. Big Red’s crew decided the smarter play was to change the engine rather than fight the mountain.

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Why Altitude Punishes Forced Induction

A supercharger works by packing more air into the cylinders than the engine could draw on its own, but that only helps as much as the surrounding atmosphere actually contains. At sea level there is plenty of density to compress. Above 9,000 feet, where much of the Pikes Peak course sits, there is simply less air available to force in, which narrows the gap between a supercharged engine and a well-built naturally aspirated one. The blower is still spinning and still consuming crankshaft power to do it, but it is compressing thinner and thinner air, so the return on that parasitic loss shrinks with every foot of elevation gained.

Swapping to The Beast

For the 2017 climb, Gottlieb’s team pulled The Elephant and installed a naturally aspirated 555-cubic-inch big-block nicknamed The Beast. It was a combination built specifically to perform without relying on a power advantage that would disappear as the road climbed toward the 9,000-foot mark and beyond. Building a second complete engine for one event is a serious commitment of money and shop time, but it reflects how seasoned Pikes Peak entrants think about the mountain: it is not one more race on the calendar, it is a unique set of physics that deserves its own hardware. The Beast was the answer to that problem.

How a Naturally Aspirated Engine Handles the Mountain

An engine like The Beast makes its power without a belt-driven or exhaust-driven device forcing air in. It simply breathes whatever the atmosphere offers straight into the cylinders. That means its power loss with altitude tends to be more predictable and more linear than a boosted engine’s, which is exactly why teams competing seriously at Pikes Peak often build a separate combination just for this one event rather than adapting their usual setup. Predictability matters on a course where the driver is making hundreds of decisions per minute; an engine that behaves the same way at the summit as it did at the start line is easier to drive at the limit.

What the Course Actually Demands

The Pikes Peak course runs 12.42 miles from start to summit, and by the 14,115-foot summit the air is roughly 40 percent thinner than at sea level, and noticeably thinner still than at the 9,390-foot start line. That is an enormous swing for any internal combustion engine to manage in a single run. It also happens to be a road with no runoff to speak of, so a car that suddenly makes less power than the driver expects mid-corner is a real problem rather than a spreadsheet inconvenience. Teams that treat the mountain like a drag strip with turns tend to learn this lesson the hard way, which is why the serious ones rebuild their combinations around thin air before they ever ship the car to Colorado.

Big Red’s Result

Big Red completed the 2017 climb in a time right around 11 minutes and 8 seconds, good for 4th place in the Open Class. That result, on a naturally aspirated combination built specifically to counteract the mountain’s thin air, validated the decision to leave the supercharged Elephant at home. Finishing just off the podium in a stacked Open Class field is a strong outcome for a car whose day job is top-speed and drag racing, and it is a reminder that a big-block Camaro can be a genuine mountain racer when the engine is built for the environment instead of for the dyno sheet.

A Different Kind of Entry

Not every serious competitor at Pikes Peak arrives in a purpose-built race car strapped to a trailer. Kash Singh, a veteran of the PPIHC Time Attack category, drove his twin-turbo 2017 Ford Mustang GT to the event under its own power, a round trip of roughly 3,590 miles, supported along the way by AMSOIL and Tire Rack. The car that lined up at the start was the same car that had just crossed a good chunk of the country on public highways, which makes his result a different kind of statement than a trailered race car’s time.

Getting There Is Its Own Event

Driving a twin-turbo street car nearly 3,600 miles round-trip just to compete is a very different commitment than showing up with a hauler. It puts real mileage, real heat cycles, and real-world exposure on a car before it ever sees the first turn of the course. That approach says something about how Time Attack competitors like Singh treat the event: as a genuine street-car test rather than a controlled competition environment. It also means any mechanical issue discovered on the drive out has to be solved on the road, without the safety net of a full race shop and a spare-parts trailer waiting nearby.

Goats, Fog, and a Personal Best

Singh’s run up the mountain was not a clean, obstacle-free hill climb. He had to contend with goats and fog along the course, conditions that never show up on a spec sheet but absolutely change how hard a driver can push a twin-turbo street car up a 12.42-mile mountain road. Fog in particular robs a driver of the visual references that make the course learnable, so a run in those conditions is as much about restraint as about aggression. Despite all of it, he posted a personal best time of 13 minutes, 22.636 seconds, an improvement on his own prior efforts in the category.

Two Competitors, One Shared Problem

Whether it is Gottlieb’s team swapping big-block combinations or Singh piloting a boosted street car up the same grade, every competitor at Pikes Peak is fighting an identical underlying problem: an engine tuned and validated at lower altitude has to perform somewhere it was never fully tested under race conditions. A twin-turbo setup like Singh’s faces its own version of the thin-air penalty, with the turbochargers working harder to reach the same manifold pressure the higher the car climbs. That shared challenge is part of what makes results at this event so hard to compare directly to anything a car has done anywhere else.

Two Very Different Definitions of Ready

Between Big Red’s engine swap and Singh’s cross-country drive just to reach the start, the 2017 Pikes Peak field showed two completely different ways of preparing for the same 12.42-mile course. One team re-engineered its powertrain around the mountain’s thin air; the other treated the entire drive to Colorado as part of the test. Neither approach is wrong, and both ended in results the teams could be proud of. What they share is respect for a course that punishes anyone who assumes it will behave like the tracks they are used to, and that respect is the real entry fee at Pikes Peak.

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