Cowboy Up: The Great Fiesta Road Trip – Day 3 – Peak Practice
July 20th, 2009 | by rarzi |
If you’ve never been to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, there are a lot of little things that will catch you off-guard, such as the incredible diversity of the cars, or the fact that practice starts at five in the morning.
You see, Pikes Peak isn’t a dedicated race track. It’s a public park that’s used once a year as a race track and the organizers are only allowed to completely take over the mountain for one day — race day. So, in order to get their practice runs in before the big day, teams and organizers have to show up before dawn on the days leading up to the race and make their practice runs before the mountain opens up to the public at 8:30 a.m.
This was quite a shock to us, as we’d rolled in at 9:30 p.m. Thursday night only to be informed that we’d need to be up at 3 a.m. in order to get up on the mountain in time. After a quick nap, we were back on the road and climbing to the starting line.
Normally, when you go to a race track, there’s a paddock area where the teams prep their cars and a track that’s fenced-off to keep the spectators back. Despite 87 years in business, Pikes Peak has retained a very strong grassroots style. Racecars, trailers and tow vehicles are parked everywhere on the sides of the roads and in the camp grounds. The starting line isn’t even a line, it’s a point where the organizers set down a fire extinguisher on the road up the mountain and where they wave the green flag from. There’s a temporary fence along the first several hundred feet of the course, but that’s it, and it certainly isn’t going to stop a car, its more to keep spectators from getting too close.
By the time we arrive at 4 a.m., Olsbergs Motorsports Experience, the team campaigning the Fiesta racecars, already has car no. 3 out and is prepping it for the first practice run at dawn. Legendary Rally Car driver Marcus Gronholm and his co-driver Timo Alanna are going over their notes on the course and the team is fueling-up the car while a crew from Ford Racing sets up video cameras on the car to record the runs.
As the sun crests the horizon, Gronholm and Alanna are strapped in and headed to the starting line. The Fiesta is one of four cars entered in the Unlimited Class, a class dominated by veteran Suzuki driver and eleven-time Pikes Peak competitor Nobuhiro Tajima. Various cars from other classes leave first, including various open-wheel buggies and even an International semi outfitted for hill-climb duty. Today, the cars are running up the bottom half of the course while the trucks and motorcycles practice on the middle and upper portions, which the cars did earlier this week. The Fiesta rolls up to the starting line, the starter waits for the previous car to get far enough up the hill, then the green flag drops and Gronholm is off in a flash.
Once all the cars have reached the finish, they’re all allowed to return to the bottom. Upon exiting the car, Gronholm is decidedly unhappy. He cut a corner too tight and damaged the large front splitter and is worried about damage to the suspension, but luckily there isn’t any. He’s more frustrated, though, about the power delivery. To give the Fiesta a decided advantage, the team strapped a very large turbocharger to the Duratec engine to create an astonishing 800 hp. Unfortunately, at this altitude the big turbo is taking too long to spool up exiting the corners and its slowing the car down. The team has a smaller turbo they could use, but they’re worried it will hurt their peak power. They’ve been trying to correct the problem instead by adjusting the gearing, but it’s only helping so much.
Gronholm, who officially retired from the World Rally Championship in 2007 after winning two WRC championships, but still drives occasionally to stave off cabin fever, is modest and fairly realistic about his chances this weekend. This is his first time at Pikes Peak and it’s the first race for the new Fiesta. What’s more, Olsbers MSE only decide to enter this race in late April and spent most of the past three months building the car. It’s only been tested on a small, circular track in Sweden and on a few runs since arriving in Colorado.
In fact, Gronholm, who qualified second in his class, is already talking about next year. Next year, he says, they’ll have the engine management and the turbocharger figured out and they’ll have better tires. The tires they’re running this year are pavement-biased and they’re hurting the car’s performance once the pavement gives way to gravel. Gronholm says he’s getting a ton of wheelspin on the slippery gravel and it’s making it hard to drive the car smoothly, though it does help keep the boost up. Still, Gronhom reckons he’d be quite a bit faster with better grip.
That’s the crux of it this year. Tajima is trying to break his own record of 10 minutes and 1 second and Gronholm thinks that if the power and grip issues were sorted out, the Fiesta could beat him. It’s already faster on the on-road portion of the track, but Tajima has the advantage on the dirt. That advantage, though, will slowly shrink if Tajima continues to race at Pikes Peak. The race organizers lost a court case to a group of environmentalists several years ago and though they weren’t forced to end the race, they were ordered to completely pave the course within 10 years. Each year, they’re paving a bit more and eventually, the race will attract an entirely different breed of racecars and drivers.
Gronholm isn’t the only one gunning for Tajima, either. This entire campaign was the brainchild of four-time Swedish Rally champ Andreas Eriksson, Gronholm’s teammate. Unfortunately, Eriksson tipped his car up on its side during a practice run earlier in the week and while it’s being repaired at a local Ford dealer for the race on Sunday, it wasn’t ready for practice today.
In the interest of comparison, we asked the Olsbergs team if they’d mind letting us drive their car a bit, but they politely declined. The Pikes Peak organizers were equally reluctant to let us race our stock Fiesta up the hill, but worked out a compromise. We had Eriksson and his co-driver Per Ola Svensson race our Fiesta instead, though they mostly making more notes on the course rather than going for time.
When the finally made it back down the hill, I asked them what they thought of the car. Eriksson, always quick to the point, simply said “Good car. We have many of them in Europe. Good car.” Svensson was a bit more blunt, pretending to yawn when I asked how he liked it. “It’s a very good car, but up here,” he said, referring to the altitude, “it’s just not enough.” We didn’t get an official time on our car, but its safe to assume it was a bit slower than Eriksson’s regular ride.
With that, the race cars were loaded up and trucked back to the dealer for more fine-tuning before the race. The team and car made an appearance Friday night at Race Fest, a street fair in downtown Colorado Springs celebrating the annual Pikes Peak event. They’ll have the day off Saturday to relax and prepare, then its show time Sunday morning.
We, on the other hand, will be busy tomorrow. Gronholm and Ericksson are giving us and other members of the media rides to the top of the mountain in brand new, Ecoboost-powered Ford Flex’s and we’re hoping to borrow one afterwards for a quick drive and evaluation. We’ll also bring our Fiesta along and find out for ourselves how it handles a climb to 14,000 ft. Stay tuned for my next blog Saturday night and full race coverage Sunday and the finale of our Fiesta road trip early next week.
Finally, I do realize that this blog is being posted rather late on Day 4, not Day 3. I should have more on Day 4 for you later tonight. Stay tuned…
Source : http://blogs.motortrend.com/6533404/miscellaneous/cowboy-up-the-great-fiesta-road-trip-day-3-peak-practice/index.html
