RJ Gottlieb’s Big Red Camaro is best known for supercharged top-speed runs, but Pikes Peak called for the opposite approach. Trading a blown 598-cube big-block for a naturally aspirated 555 called The Beast, the team made its 2017 debut on the 12.42-mile Race to the Clouds. Their fourth-place finish in the Open class shows why displacement can still out-duel boost at altitude.
With no small amount of effort, RJ Gottlieb and his infamous Big Red Camaro came back from the ashes to finish in Open Class with an 11:08.857 (placing Fourth), while PPIHC Time Attack veteran Kash Singh brought his street-driven (3,590-mile round-trip), twin-turbo 2017 Ford Mustang GT, supported by AMSOIL and Tire Rack, with a personal best of 13:22.636 after dodging a few goats and fog.
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Most cars that tackle the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb are built around one idea: forced induction that can keep breathing in air that thins by nearly 40 percent from base to summit. RJ Gottlieb’s team faced an odd problem with Big Red, their notorious ’69 Camaro — the supercharged big-block that had already terrorized top-speed events wouldn’t have the same bite above 9,000 feet. Rather than fight the mountain with more boost, they did the opposite: they pulled the blower and built something they simply called “The Beast.” Big Red had never raced anything like the 12.42-mile course to the clouds before. Could a naturally aspirated big-block, tuned for a completely different kind of racing, actually hang with the turbo and supercharged specialists that usually rule Pikes Peak?
Trading “The Elephant” for “The Beast”
Big Red’s usual weapon for top-speed and drag events is a supercharged 598 cubic-inch Chevy big-block nicknamed “The Elephant.” For Pikes Peak, the team swapped it for a naturally aspirated 555 cubic-inch big-block they call “The Beast” — a deliberate bet that a huge-displacement engine without forced induction would cope better with the altitude than a blower fighting to force thin air into the cylinders.
Fourth Place Without a Single Turbo
In its 2017 debut at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, Big Red posted an 11:08.357 climb, good enough for fourth place in the Open class — a field dominated by cars running forced induction specifically because of the altitude. That result validated the naturally aspirated approach in a race where displacement rarely gets to compete evenly with boost.
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