Cowboy Up: The Great Fiesta Road Trip – Day 4 – To the Peak With Gronholm
July 20th, 2009 | by rarzi |
Things are different at 14,000 feet. The view, naturally, is spectacular, but it comes at a price. Simple activities such as walking and carrying on a conversation can leave you winded, and even in mid-July, it’s quite cold. And to think, at the peak we’re only half as high as the summit of Everest.
With Pikes Peak reopened to the public for the day and busy with tourists, campers, race fans and crews assembling large tents and scaffoldings, there was no racing to be done. So instead, Ford brought in a pair of brand-new, Ecoboost-powered Flex’s and had the Olsbergs Motorsports drivers give us a ride to the summit to see just what it is they’ll be doing tomorrow morning.
Since the opportunity to go for a ride with Marcus Gronholm comes along only once in a great while, we leapt at it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite the white-knuckle experience it sounds like. As I said, the peak was reopened to the public today, and it turns out the day before the Hill Climb is the busiest day of the year here. You see, people aren’t normally allowed to camp overnight on the mountain for safety reasons, but for one day a year — the day before the Climb — they’re permitted to do so in order to stake out great viewing locations for the race the next day. So, the road up the mountain was a mess and our speeds were limited.
That’s only half the story, though. When he isn’t racing, Gronholm is a very safe and conservative driver. He leaves plenty of space between cars and drives very smoothly without a lot of fuss. His teammate, Andreas Eriksson, he jokes, always drives like he’s in his rally car.
Still, this ride wasn’t about scaring a bunch of journalists silly, though word has it that’s more or less what happened in some of the Fiestas that were following us up the hill. No, today’s drive was about understanding what it is the driver and navigator do when they’re racing up this mountain at ludicrous speed.
“Kira, kira,” Navigator Timo Alanna says as we enter a turn. Gronholm explains that Alanna is telling him in Finnish that this turn gets tighter as you go through it. Much of our drive is like this as Gronholm and Alanna go over their notes, taking one last opportunity to scout out the route before the big race tomorrow. They naturally revert to speaking their native Finnish, but are always quick to explain what they’re doing in English.
What they’re doing, quite simply, is focusing on the road and only the road. Never mind that most of the route up the mountain is free of guard rails and in most cases the ground drops off for a hundred feet or more just inches off the road surface. Most would consider racing up a road like this to be insane, but Gronholm and Alanna aren’t paying any attention to the cliffs and their inherent danger.
“I don’t think about it,” Gronholm said. “I just think about what I am doing.” When asked how he deals with cliffs as he rides shotgun, Alanna tells the same story. “I am concentrating on the notes. I don’t pay attention to what’s outside.”
On a short, relatively straight, stretch of dirt road between two switchbacks, Gronholm tells us that, in his racecar, he’d hit 120 mph here without any thought to the fact that the slightest error would send him and Alanna hurtling over cliff and several hundred feet down the mountain. When asked slow he goes, particularly in the corners, Gronholm said “not very.” Soon, we’re nearing the top and Gronholm and Alanna point out the one corner on the track that gets their hearts pumping, a steep, uphill, right-hand switchback turn that is completely blind and as you approach it, looks almost as if the road simply ends and you’ll just launch out into nothing.
At the top, everything goes wrong. Mind you, all the cars and people in them made it to the top fine. After seeing the sights and eating the traditional doughnut and hot chocolate at the store at the peak, we all begin to pile back into the vehicles for the ride down. As more and more cars leave, though, it quickly becomes apparent that the keys to our Fiesta are missing. At Ford’s request, we had loaned it to some Ford engineers from Europe to drive as we rode along with the pro drivers. Unfortunately, an engineer got into another car with our key in his pocket and left our car stranded at the peak. A local Ranger was surprised the car had made it up there at all, and though it required a lot of time at the top end of first gear, it did it.
(As an aside, if you’re wondering why I’m climbing out the trunk of the Fiesta, it’s because it refused to lock without the key present and with a door open, so we thought we’d try it with the doors closed and the trunk open. It didn’t work. As soon as we closed the trunk, the doors unlocked again.)
As there’s no cell phone service on the top of the mountain, or on most of the road down for that matter, what ensued was a low-speed car chase down the mountain and many unsuccessful attempts to call the car with our keys. Unfortunately, they had a big head start on us and we eventually had to drive all the way down the mountain and back into town before we got a hold of the other car, which was already down at the race track where the Fiesta racecar would undergo final testing, and get one of them to drive back and meet us with the key. We then drove all the way back to the top of the mountain to retrieve our car.
While this all sounds like quite the inconvenience, there is a silver lining. The Fiesta key debacle afforded me the opportunity to drive an Ecoboost Flex down Pikes Peak and back up as well as on regular roads and highways, so I’ll be able to put together some drive impressions for you a bit later. For amusement’s sake, we timed my run up the mountain and since it was hampered by traffic and El Paso County Sheriffs, we won’t go into the exact numbers. I’d like to point out for the record, though, that it was on par with the finishing times of the cars that first raced on Pikes Peak in 1916. Hard to imagine that in 87 years the record has only been halved, to its current time of 10:01. My trip down was hampered by the fact that there is no way to disable the stability control on a European-spec Fiesta, severely limiting my fun.
While we were busy running up and down the mountain, the team was busy putting both Fiesta racecars through their paces at a local racetrack. Testing completed, all have retired to their hotel rooms to rest up before tomorrow. The schedule dictates that we be at the track as early as 7 a.m. if we want to get a good vantage point to cover the race and bring you coverage. As there’s only one road up the mountain and the trolly takes you well beyond the start line and down into a town near the base of the mountain, once you’ve picked a spot on the track, you’re basically stuck until the race is over.
While the race is scheduled to end around 2 p.m., last year’s race saw 14 crashes and 3 trips up the mountain by the Life Flight helicopter to retrieve injured drivers, so it could last until 5 p.m. or later. There’s also a 30% chance of rain tomorrow. If nothing else, this will be exciting.
Whenever the race ends, we’ll be packing our gear back into our recently-rescued Fiesta and striking out for New Mexico. If all goes to plan, I’ll bring you another blog with complete race coverage tomorrow night and we’ll be home in Los Angeles Monday night and I’ll have a complete wrap-up of The Great Fiesta Road Trip for you. Stay tuned…
Source : http://blogs.motortrend.com/6533590/miscellaneous/cowboy-up-the-great-fiesta-road-trip-day-4-to-the-peak-with-gronholm/index.html
