The Mountain Does Not Care: Jonny Lieberman's Pikes Peak Race Report

You want to hear God laugh? Make plans. Mine: Compete in the 100th running of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, racing to the top of the famous mountain. Most responses upon hearing what I intended to do involved a good-natured version of, "Try not to die!" The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, as you may have heard, is about as extreme as motorsports get. Dying was the last thing on my agenda, however. First was to make it to the top. Second was to make it to the topquickly. These were of course my plans before I arrived in Colorado. I soon learned, for its part, the mountain doesn't even bother with a chuckle. The mountain does not care.

I ran in the Porsche Pikes Peak Trophy by Yokohama class, driving a 2019 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsport along with four other virtually identical Porsches, plus a previous-generation GT4 Clubsport with a balance-of-performance-type tune. It was my rookie run up the mountain, and the entire experience proved to be far more complex, more mentally and physically grueling, and more emotional than I had accounted for.

I wish I could have bottled how fantastic I felt on Friday morning, two days before the race. Friday was an optional session day following three early mornings of mandatory practice. Participation in optional sessions carries a risk versus reward calculation: The car has made it this far, so why chance it before race day? The trick is to balance that risk against the truism that time spent driving up Pikes Peak is more valuable than gold.

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I opted to use the Friday session to work on Pikes Peak's bottom section, the longest and most complicated portion of the route. It's also the section I'd been struggling with the most. We'd run it Tuesday, and I had one decent run at the end, but that was as much luck as anything. My main competition in my class came from an unknown rookie, an incredibly warm and friendly French-Canadian fellow named Gilles Nadeau. Based on the sum of our practice times, I was about 3 seconds quicker than Nadeau, but only because I had a great run on the upper section during Thursday's practice session, besting Nadeau by 5 seconds. Nadeau was a second quicker on both the bottom and middle sections, and he maintained that advantage through Friday; nonetheless, I left the mountain after that session feeling confident, maybe even a touch elated. In my mind, the battle for fourth place was on.

The day of the race, the temperature fell down to the 40s at the starting line, it was raining, and a few inches of snow fell the night before. The weather report had called for up to 10 inches of snow, so in a sense we got lucky. It's notoriously difficult if not impossible to predict the weather on Pikes Peak. As one local chestnut puts it, "The mountain creates its own weather." Not only is Pikes Peak massive, with its summit reaching 14,115 feet, but it also sits farther east than any other Colorado fourteener, right on the edge of the Front Range, perfectly situating it for extreme, rapidly changing weather patterns. The precipitation wasn't much of an issue. There is no "wet line" for Pikes; the road is so tortuous and steep that water doesn't pool. The Yokohama Advan A052s everyone in my class ran are damn grippy in the cold, too. Had a bit of dampness been the only weather to deal with, the race would have been great. But no, the mountain decided to curse us with fog. Like, a lot of fog. Regardless, the race was on.

Pikes Peak International Hill Climb chairman Fred Veitch looks and is sized just like Jeremy Clarkson, and our initial conversation was 70 percent curse words. The gist of it: His car had long worn No. 73, and he was displeased that I took his number. One practice morning he even changed all the threes on my car to eights, assuring me the "problem" had been "solved." I said, "Glad you're focused on the important stuff, Mr. Chairman."

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On race day Fred asked if I had anyone in mind to wave the green flag for me. I thought my 5-year-old son would make a great flag waver. "No, we can't have kids doing that," Veitch began before catching himself: "I'm the chairman of the fucking board. He can wave the flag." Soon I was belted into my car, giving a thumbs-up to my excellent crew chief, Jason Schmitt, and watching my wife and son wave me off for the 100th running of Pikes Peak. That part was awesome. Everything else? Even though I'd climb nearly 5,000 feet over the next 12.42 miles, it was all downhill from there.

Porsche Motorsports North America recommended everyone in the class set the GT4 Clubsport's ABS switch to 8. This is some sort of hidden wet mode. True, the cars had actual Wet modes, but because the tires aren't the factory circumference, there was worry it wouldn't work. ABS 8 meant both traction and stability controls had to be on, which really affected the little Porsches. At the starting line 9,380 feet above sea level, the rear-drive Clubsports make about 360 horsepower instead of their rated 420 hp. By the 14,115-foot peak, power is down to 252 hp. With the traction and stability nannies on, any bit of slippage results in the computer braking the car, robbing us of precious momentum. Had it been a normal wet day, I'm confident I would have rotated the switch back to ABS 3 after the first few corners and hit the buttons to turn everything off, damp pavement be damned. But the fog was brutal. See, my friends? The mountain doesn't care.

The GT4 Clubsport retains the regular GT4's launch control. At the start, I held the revs for a couple of seconds, dumped the brakes, and not much happened. With traction control on, the poor little Porsche struggled for grip and lurched off the line, and I wasn't too happy. Fortunately, a great launch isn't crucial, as the clock doesn't start until you go through the timing gates. Sure, getting there quicker is better, but a poor launch wasn't fatal.

Off the line you travel straight for about 100 feet and then yank the wheel hard left for the first of 156 corners. It was at that moment I came to the horrible realization that I could not see the second one. It was buried in fog. Only 154 more to go.

Some say a "real racer" has excuses lined up and ready to go. Here are mine: I simply could not see. Some 75 percent of my run up the mountain happened in fog. In the brief moments when the fog broke—essentially the second half of the bottom section through Glen Cove and three corners after it—I was in an unnecessary wet mode with both traction and stability control slowing things down. Had I been more seasoned, I would have had the presence of mind to dial the ABS down, but it was my first ever run. That's theothercrazy thing about Pikes Peak—if you're a rookie, the first time you run the entire course is on race day. There was approximately a half mile of track I'd never driven at speed. And most of that was buried in fog.

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An example of inexperience as an excuse: A hairpin called Double Cut skirts a big pile of rocks. Like most hairpins on Pikes, it's a first gear corner. However, the corner there is quite wide, while most of the others are tight and narrow. As a result, I overcooked it a bit, the rear stepped out, and the nannies came down like a blast shield. It felt as if the car was shutting itself down. Being a greenhorn, instead of realizing what was happening, I reflexively pulled second gear. With the GT4 Clubsport's long second gear, if the rear starts to slide around with the electronics off, you simply pull for second and the drop in revs acts just like traction control. Thing is, if you're barely moving in the first place, shifting to second gear compounds the problem, so I went from slow and listless to essentially stopped. I just didn't have the presence of mind to switch the computers off.

Despite the handicap, in my mind I was still pushing hard until about a mile from the summit. That's where you'll find a corner my coach, Pikes Peak hall of famer and 19-time driver Jeff Zwart, calls Talladega. It's a long, fast, banked sweeper; despite being at nearly 14,000 feet, it's a damn fast, relatively bump-free corner. (Frost-damaged, lumpen pavement is a dangerous fixture of the upper section.) I had a vague idea I was in the middle of Talladega when the fog briefly broke, and I realized I was about 100 feet ahead of where I thought I was. Danger! Danger! Bells started going off in my head. I saw my kid's face. It was over. That French-Canadian Nadeau could have fourth place. I gave up at that point, whoaing it down and hoping to achieve just one of my two goals: Make it to the top. I wasn't disappointed in that moment—more relieved to not be racing blind in one of the most dangerous car races in the world.

I took the checkered flag without incident or much emotion. I'd done it, and I was proud to be at the summit. I'd driven a race car to the top of Pikes Peak. That is mine forever. Once past the finish line, I sat in my car for several minutes, soaking everything in as Zwart had advised. Bittersweet. That was what I was feeling. This race was bittersweet. I walked into the Summit Visitor Center to grab a donut (laypeople know Pikes Peak as "the race to the clouds"; racers call it "the race to the donuts") and plopped myself down among the other competitors, each of them feeling the same way. Happy to be alive and on top, sure but mostly robbed of what could have been. Fog, it turns out, is just the worst.

"I had it twice as bad as you!" a visibly agitated Randy Pobst said. Poor Pobst was on pace to win his class in his Unplugged Performance Tesla Model S Plaid. He'd set the best times in the bottom and middle sections of the Exhibition class, but when he got to the upper third, his windshield fogged up. He was running the defroster, but the fan was on a low setting, and the Plaid's fan controls are buried in a screen—not something you can mess with during a race. Pobst had to loosen his belts so he could lean forward and wipe off the windshield with his glove. David Donner wound up coming in first in that class in a nearly stock Porsche 911 Turbo S. Pobst was gutted.

And we all were gutted. Even Donner. I'd never been up top on race day before. Those who had assured me the mood was joyous in a typical year. That day? Just sour and down. Everyone had an anecdote like mine, losing themselves in the fog then forcing a correction when a moment of clarity revealed their true location. Blame the weather, blame bad luck, hell, blame God. Just don't blame the mountain, for it simply does not care.

As for me, I still came in fourth in my class; George Hess—who is faster than me—dropped a wheel and blew a tire. Nadeau kicked my ass by about 30 seconds, as he's a braver man than I, and came in third. Next year? Oh, you'd better believe there will be a next year. Unlike the mountain, I care.