(car engine revving)
Narrator: You're looking
at the most dangerous racetrack in America.
(car engine revving)
At over 12 miles long,
this course climbs through the Rocky Mountains
up to the summit of Colorado's legendary Pikes Peak,
14,115 feet above sea level.
What starts as a simple road course on a public highway
any ol' person can drive on
turns into a dangerous trek above the clouds
for the final leg to the finish line.
On a mountaintop road with an average speed limit
of 25 miles per hour, competitors tear down the track
at 140 with no braking markers, turn indicators,
or frame of reference for where they even are.
Just sky in front of them and 2,000-foot drop-offs
mere feet to their right.
One wrong move and one could easily go over the edge.
Woman: Oh my God!
Narrator: It's this top section of the course
that makes the historic Pikes Peak Hill Climb so dangerous.
The first Pikes Peak Hill Climb was held in 1916,
promoted by famous entrepreneur Spencer Penrose.
Since then, the hill climb has evolved
into an international competition
featuring some of the most incredible
race cars and superbikes ever built.
Drivers and motorcyclists compete one by one
for the best possible time to the top
of the gigantic mountain.
And a highway that takes the average person
one to three hours to drive
gets covered by these professionals in around 10 minutes.
But Pikes Peak hasn't gone without seeing
its fair share of tragedy.
In 2019, the race's organizers
suspended the climb's motorcycle division
following the death of four-time winner Carlin Dunne
in a crash near the finish line.
But what makes the final few miles of the course
one of the most death-defying challenges around
can be summarized by four things:
the amount of unprotected blind turns,
unstable road conditions, enormous altitude,
and an unpredictable environment.
Tommy Boileau: For me, I think the most difficult part
of the road was the entire top section.
You're well above tree line at that point,
so it's really intimidating visually
just because there's just barren cliffs everywhere you look.
Narrator: That's Tommy Boileau,
a professional race car driver
who competed in his first Pikes Peak Hill Climb in 2019,
when he was awarded the race's Rookie of the Year prize.
We spoke with him as well as IndyCar driver
and Pikes Peak veteran JR Hildebrand
about just what makes driving
on top of this mountain so dangerous.
To start with, there's the absurd amount of blind corners.
156, to be exact,
throughout the entire Pikes Peak racecourse.
But the most terrifying ones can be found at the top.
Tommy: It is incredibly dangerous.
There's no guardrails and at the majority of the corners,
the speeds are incredibly high.
Narrator: Unlike a typical track,
the majority of turns lack barricades.
One mistake at a hairpin bend
can send you hurling over the edge thousands of feet,
like driver Jeremy Foley in 2012
when his car lost grip of the road.
(people screaming)
Miraculously, Foley and his copilot, Yuri Kouznetsov,
both walked away from one of the race's worst crashes
in recent history.
JR Hildebrand: There are other forms of motorsport
that have similar maybe it's trees off the side
of a stage rally or a water hazard or something like that.
Even driving at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,
where maybe I might hit the wall at 200 miles an hour.
But this is very much in your face.
There's only one thing is gonna happen
if you go off track, and it's not good.
Tommy: You have to learn the road.
You have to memorize all 156 corners.
There's some corners that look very, very similar
where sometimes you're coming into a corner
at top of fourth gear
and gotta carry 120 miles an hour on exit,
or there's another corner that looks almost identical,
but you have to slow down to a first gear hairpin on exit.
JR: Just memorizing the circuit
and being familiar with it initially
is one of the most difficult things to do.
And I think it's as difficult to do there
as it is anywhere in the world.
Coming from a road-racing background,
you don't have any of those markers,
sightlines that you're used to,
you don't have braking points.
There's nothing telling you what's coming up
or how close you are to the next corner,
or any of those kinds of things.
Narrator: Then there's the change in altitude.
Pikes Peak stands at a height of 14,115 feet;
that's equivalent to the length
of almost 39 football fields.
For anyone whose body isn't acclimated to the elevation,
altitudes this high have very noticeable effects
on the human body
because of the intense decrease in oxygen levels.
These effects can range
from simply poor athletic performance
to dizziness and dehydration.
But for motorsport athletes,
even the vehicle can be affected that high up.
JR: You are combating this element of altitude.
So not only is the car working differently at the top
than it does at the bottom,
it's not making as much horsepower,
but the tires are kind of smoked
from having gone through this whole run up the hill,
the aerodynamics aren't working as well
because the air's less dense,
but also physically you're experiencing
this dramatic change in altitude
over the course of the event.
I mean, you're ending at 14,000 feet,
which feels like you've had a couple beers
when you get to the top just from being so high up.
Tommy: I am kind of fortunate, being local here.
I grew up in Colorado, so I'm used to the elevation.
So my blood oxygen saturation
is much higher than most other drivers.
But you've got a lot of drivers that come in
from different countries and states.
They tend to struggle with the elevation a little bit,
so that in itself is a bit of a risk
just because your body takes time to adapt.
Just to eliminate any excuse
or any errors that we could have,
I did run an oxygen bottle inside of the car,
which is really common.
The majority of the guys, especially the front-running guys,
we all run oxygen inside of the car
directly into our helmets.
Narrator: Drivers at the top of Pikes Peak
are also in danger of unpredictable road conditions
that don't compare to what racers find
on your average circuit.
The highway is regularly hit by rough weather,
but doesn't receive the same treatment that other streets
or professional tracks do to ensure safety.
The freezing temperatures
at the top of the mountain don't help either.
Tommy: The road itself isn't maintained
the same way that a proper racetrack would be.
There's no street sweepers going out there
to make sure that there's no gravel.
Being a 14,000-foot tall mountain,
you get a lot of snow and water that runs across the road
in different places and things like that.
But also, up that high in the elevation,
the road tends to warp a lot
through the freeze-thaw process throughout the winter.
So even during race week,
there would be a bump that would develop in one corner
that wasn't there the day before.
Narrator: Even changes to the road
expected to make it more safe didn't help at all.
In 1998, environmental organization the Sierra Club
sued the city of Colorado Springs,
alleging that gravel erosion from Pikes Peak Highway
caused water pollution.
The city was forced to pave
the entire dirt and gravel highway,
something that would only make the historic race event
even more dangerous.
Tommy: People think that driving on the gravel is
more dangerous, but in reality, the speeds are much lower
if you're driving on that dirt surface.
And effectively the racetrack itself is wider.
So by getting that pavement placed
all the way from top to bottom,
the speeds went drastically higher
throughout the entire course of the run.
JR: As we think about it in motorsports terms,
you're pulling more G's through the corners
because it's paved, the cars have more grip.
You might be in more control doing that,
but because you're generating more load,
a little mistake can really move you
off the track by a lot more.
Narrator: And from the weather to the environment,
all bets are off at the top of Pikes Peak,
when you're driving through the Rocky Mountain wilderness.
This means storms at the top of the mountain
that roll in at a moment's notice on race day.
And in some extreme situations,
unpredicted encounters with wildlife.
JR: I went down to Pikes Peak last year
to hang out with Travis Pastrana.
And on his run, he got up through
up to kinda where a tree line breaks
so you're talking 1,100 feet or something,
it started pouring rain for like eight corners
going through these W's going up the hill.
And then he got above that and it was clear again.
So then he kinda like gets back on it
and then he came through a blind corner,
and there were mountain goats all over the road.
And so that's, I mean, that's,
you hear crazy stories like that
all across the board from people.
Narrator: But despite so many life-threatening hazards
that come with driving a racecourse like Pikes Peak,
professional drivers continue returning
and the number of entries keeps increasing.
It's an eye-opening, once-in-a-lifetime experience
for those who partake, even the spectators.
The race is incomparable to that of any in the world,
and the level of danger can't be found
on any other American race course.
But with so much history behind the race,
the esteem that comes
with being crowned king of the mountain,
and the adrenaline rush that comes
from driving on the edge of certain death,
to drivers this competitive
and in love with the sport of racing,
the rewards far outweigh the risk.
(upbeat music)