VW: Return to the Pikes Peak mountain race
MOTORSPORT Romain Dumas, a Frenchman who lives in Switzerland, is set to write another chapter of success for Volkswagen Motorsport. At the famous U.S. mountain race Pikes Peak, which he has already won three times, the Swiss by choice will be driving a specially designed electric prototype. While Volkswagen's competitors are becoming increasingly involved in FIA Formula E, the Wolfsburg-based company is taking a different approach. More than [...]
While Volkswagen's competitors are becoming increasingly involved in FIA Formula E, the Wolfsburg-based company is taking a different approach. More than 30 years after their last participation in the world's most famous hill climb, the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in the U.S. state of Colorado, the Germans are returning there in June.
VW is developing a completely new electric prototype. In this class, the regulations allow great technical freedom. The technical goal is to prove the performance of future battery and drive technology from Volkswagen in competition.
The start of this race is on June 24, 2018 at 2862 m altitude, the finish line is after 20 kilometers at 4302 m altitude. This is why Pikes Peak is also called Race to the Clouds - different weather conditions during the race are commonplace.
The Swiss by choice Romain Dumas knows the race very well
The driver is 40-year-old Romain Dumas, a Swiss by choice who has already won this race three times. For a long time, the Frenchman lived in the heart of Basel, moved to Arzier VD above Lake Geneva a few years ago, and competed in Switzerland for the first time last October at the Rallye du Valais in a Porsche 911 GT3 R-GT. In 2016, together with Neel Jani and Marc Lieb, he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the drivers' world championship title with Porsche.
Romain Dumas: "This hill climb is a big challenge because each competitor only has one try. But I have great confidence in Volkswagen Motorsport. The team is highly motivated and has already proven several times that it can be successful on unfamiliar terrain right from the start. The big advantage of an electric vehicle in hill climbs is that the power remains constant over the entire distance of just under 20 kilometers. Vehicles with combustion engines, on the other hand, lose a lot of power in the thin air at altitude. I've had to live with that in my previous participations. I'm really looking forward to being able to drive at full power for the first time from the start at 2,862 meters to the finish."
In a short video, Jochi Kleint, who drove a rally Golf for VW at Pikes Peak 30 years ago, symbolically hands over his former gear to his successor:
