Written By: Paul Gerrard
Photos: courtesy of Dave Liddle
It started with a photo on Facebook. A single picture on the Performance Race Industries (PRI) news feed. It showed a rolling tubular chassis with a twin turbo Chevy LS (of course!) sitting behind a tiny driver cell with giant meaty tires hung off a formula style pushrod three spring suspension. “Interesting” I muttered as zoomed in trying to gobble up any details I could, “that looks like it would be a bonkers Pikes Peak car”.
My scanning came up with a name: LoveFab. A quick search came up with a YouTube Video, a video with a lot of views and a lot of fire. “well that’s not good…”. Against my better judgment I didn’t let it go, I messaged LoveFab and got a response from a guy named Cody Loveland… the builder and pilot of the fireball. We exchanged pleasantries and quickly cut to the chase:
Me “is this car built for Pikes Peak?”
Cody “yes”
Me “I’d like to drive it”
Cody “….” (he googles me while I wait for a response)
Cody “how tall are you?”
Me “5’7” “
Cody “OK”
The first tiny steps in a journey up a 14,115ft mountain, one of fifty eight “fourteeners” in Colorado but this one is special, it has a road all that way to the top and unlike Mt. Evans (that you can also drive to the top of) Pikes Peak has happened to host a Race To the Clouds for nearly a century there, the only older race in the United States is the Indy 500. Why does this race perceiver, why is it adored internationally? It is impossible that’s why. You see it is a public road for 364 days of the year and it moves. That’s right the paved road physically moves, the whole mountain is constantly shifting geologically. That was OK when it was gravel since it was always graded smooth but the Sierra Club got a bee in its bonnet in 1998 and decided to make a statement on America’s Mountain. It took 13 years and the paving was complete…on top of a continuously shifting and heaving mountain.
We now had a paved road, game changer, no more beautiful arching drifts performed by everything from Stock Cars to Wells Coyotes or occasionally exotic foreign factory built 1000hp fire breathing AWD monsters (go to YouTube and watch “Climb Dance”). Couldn’t you now just show up with and Indy Car a F1 car or group C prototype and rule the roost, rewrite the record books? The mountain moves. You now had more grip but more bumps, the Wells didn’t have the grip for pavement but it had the travel for the bumps while the Le Mans car had the grip but not the wheel travel. Suddenly (well, over 13 years suddenly) there wasn’t a car that could tame the mountain. The mountain is and always will be in charge from its continuously undulating surface to its ever changing unpredictable and often violent weather.
The fireball guy (Cody Loveland) knew this, in his small shop in rural Michigan he hatched a plan. Build a modern Pikes Peak special, there have been many Pikes Peak Specials over the hundred years but this one, this one was the first purpose-built car to come with the moving pavement in the crosshairs. What did it require? A prototype with suspension travel. Steal all the positive attributes form the old school dirt cars and marry them to a modern prototypes’ downforce and grip.
The Enviate (NSX+V8, an homage to Cody’s prior builds)
It’s a hybrid, oh don’t worry, not the gas sipping left lane sitting kind of hybrid, the cool kind like a lonely werewolf meets a vampire kind of hybrid… that chugs Sunoco 118 octane like an army of frat boys with beer bongs. It’s got it all travel, downforce and grip. Perfect uphill weight distribution that lets it launch off corners like it was AWD without the added weight and complexity of AWD. It’s designed for today’s very different and difficult Pikes Peak.
If this were your typical marketing story from a manufacturer it would be simple matter now of sending Cody’s bank a rather large seven figure check and then ordering some champagne to spray at the top when the deed is done. We can dream can’t we? Because I the driver/writer am not employed by a corporation and sitting writing this in a spotless and spacious corner office, I am a dude who likes to drive for a living and has to scrape together every possible potential opportunity that comes my way. Cody knows the feeling all too well but his scars run deeper, yea there is the fireball moment but he also has to foot the bill, the car is his, the financial reality of his dream. Dreaming is free but reality, reality is expensive.
Day by Day, Dollar by Dollar
It begins, we have a car, we have a driver, we have a goal, the 2016 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Now you’ll probably be asking yourself if the year is a typo. No, that’s racing as they say. The best laid plans and all that. Pike Peak is a unique event, you see you have to be invited. This presents a problem to small new team especially is they have already done something quite memorable on the mountain (like burst into flames for example). The problem is universal, we have a dream and an actual rolling car but no sponsors and the one thing any sponsor does not want to hear is that we might get in. Please send us stuff and/or money because we might be able to fulfill our obligations to you is not a strong marketing pitch. The other tricky bit is that entries are not confirmed until April only giving you a practically useless three months to make it all happen. Would love to see that all become more sponsor friendly in the future but that is todays reality. So, 2016 was not meant to be but a least we now had a more realistic block of time to get things accomplished.
Switzerland, Home of Fine Chocolates, Diamonds, Watches and…
A simple Facebook photo, it got my attention but I wasn’t the only one. A small village called Hinwil near Zurich appropriately at the base of a large mountain sits one of only two Formula One teams not to reside in the United Kingdom (the other being Ferrari). Sauber, it’s a medium sized F1 team (300 employees) with a long and storied history of being gritty, determined and always punching well above it weight (budget). Out of the 300, many (as you might guess) are engineers and as you might also guess have Facebook accounts. Formula One may be the ultimate expression of motorsports but it certainly is not the paradigm of self-expression. Formula One is about two things: Rules and Money. Two things relatively that boxed all 300 of the Suaber employees into the midfield at best. No dreaming here just cold hard facts, rules and boxes that the car and the team, had to fit into. Somewhere deep in the inner workings of this fine mid-priced Swiss watch was a cog with an imagination, a cog with a dream…and Facebook.
Sebastien Lamour: F1 Aerodynamicist
When Cody in sitting in his cold, dark shop in Michigan in the middle of a long bleak Midwestern Winter just looking for something to weld so he might stay warm and hears his cheery Facebook messenger chime and casually has a peek at his phone (which is permanently attached to the front of Cody’s face, welding or not). “Hmmm Se-bas-tien La-Mour, who is that?”
Seb: “ello Cody, I work for the Sauber F1 team”
Cody thinks “and I’m the president of the United States” but actually asks for more information and starts Googling immediately…he is legit. Cody answers: “what do you do there?”
Seb: “I am an aerodynamicist, I saw you picture and I have always wanted to do Pikes Peak”
Cody: instantly sobbing uncontrollably types “yes please”
An Unlikely Alliance
So you have an old school tubular chassis (albeit it with perfect geometry, thanks to Aric Streeter) mated to an old school Chevy LS TT driven by a part time lifetime pro and soon to be wrapped in state of the art carbon fiber designed by one on the best in the business all being done on a shoestring budget by Cody. He had to learn how to build carbon fiber parts but if you know Cody, it doesn’t matter, zero fear in that man, with a talent for learning things nearly instantaneously.
Seb is sending CAD files running it all virtually in the wind tunnel and Cody and I are out on our own sponsor hunting but we are not alone, we are not the only people who saw that photo. I mentioned Aric Streeter the cheery Sirius/XM engineer, Manuel Grenier also from Sauber (specializing in suspension), Shawn Zimmerman the crew chief, Adam Peeling the engine tuner, Tyler Hassing the engine builder, Nick Jesaitis mechanic, Cole Duran the Colorado Springs shop owner and Dan Piper, finally Jessica Crowbridge who gets the unenviable task of making us somehow seem presentable. All of us from different parts of the world with distinctive pieces of a common puzzle a common dream, Cody’s crazy dream. He and the mountains cast a spell on us, we had to see the car to the top, the ultimate underdog story. Can David really slay Goliath?
Reality Bites
While I did sit in Enviate at the PRI show in December 2016 I did not get to drive her until June 2nd 2017, it didn’t go very well. One just my second lap in the car the throttle stuck wide open, now if you know driving you know this is not a small thing especially when you are unfamiliar with the car, fortunately my first reaction was to swipe the switches I had just been walked through a few minutes prior and crises averted, after that was resolved I was able to sample the awesome pace and visceral power of a car with a one to one power to weight ratio, perfect weight distribution, big sticky tires and carbon brakes. It means in every direction this car without the aero downforce (low speeds) can generate about 2G’s of force, that’s accelerating (very rare, usually only drag cars) cornering and braking, then you add in the aero component and the cars speed very rapidly increases and you soon can corner and brake well above 4G’s. We called it good after the cooling system starting showing signs of overheating, we suspected it was due to the low speed nature of the IMI track but as it turns out this would haunt us all the way to the top of Pikes Peak.
Reality Really Does Bite
The next time I drove the car was at LaJunta which was a WWII B-24 base, it’s rough, perfect, it would test the suspension and see if it would be up to the rigors of Pike Peak (or so we hoped). Again, the car showed staggering speed (close to the track record in a few laps) but as fast as it went the temps would also rise which limited us to short runs. One the second run accelerating over a bump on the exit of the corner a rear suspension pushrod folded in two instantly dropping the right rear on the deck, I dutifully slowed the car and the team rolled out to recover me and the stricken Enviate. It was late, just after sunset and evidently a significant proportion of the mosquitos in the world live at the track and sleep until sunset. We were attacked as we tried to load the car with each of us suffering from hundreds if not thousands of bites in what seemed like an eternity getting the bottomed-out car into the trailer.
The car may have been loaded and us on our way but we still had a two-hour drive to the shop in Colorado Springs, did I mention the next morning was our mandatory official test on the mountain? Did I mention we were on double secret probation with the Pikes Peak officials because fireball? This was the first of many many all-nighters to come from the crew. We were mere weeks from the race and driving the car in anger for the first time (#teamnosleep became a thing). The ticking from the clock was getting overbearingly loud.
The Test
Pikes Peak mountain is big, so big that you never get to drive to the top in a single run, for testing they break it into sections to spread people all over the mountain and maximize driving time albeit one section at a time. We were on the bottom. They also are pragmatic in another sense, it’s a toll road so they don’t want to lose any potential revenue so we test early, real early. Usually from 5 AM until 8:30 AM, that means we usually have to leave by THREE IN THE MORNING to be set up in time. Somehow Cody Aric and Nick with the help of Cole and Dale had managed not just to repair but completely reengineer the pushrods on both sides and replace the bending heim joints in the rear suspension, re-align the car and get it to the mountain, that’s after being eaten by mosquitos and arriving at the shop at 11PM. The first of many nights catching a few minutes of sleep on a couch (this was to become a really miserable version of Groundhog Day by the time race week arrived).
We are in line, I am excited and a bit apprehensive (suspension failures and sticking throttles tend to do that) but my job is simple on Groundhog Day, wipe the slate clean a just drive the car. I have one job to drive the car at its current possible limit while keeping it on the road (oh and provide feedback to the team). First run and I’m off and it feels like the car has a mind of its own, darting all over the road. What felt good on a racetrack felt positively diabolical, leaping from side to side while going straight braking or cornering, only under power did it feel just OK. It was a test though I couldn’t just cruise up the segment, they were watching. On the last run I just went for it taking a huge chunk of time off and as we found out after passing our probation test as we were now officially in! We had made that mistake that assumption that I am sure countless teams have made: “Pikes Peak is probably about as bumpy as a bad race track” “and I can go test on a bad race track therefore and get my Pikes Peak setup dialed in without having to really go there” wrong wrong wrong, Pikes Peak is so much bumpier (and maybe more important: undulating) that you can’t compare it to anywhere else. We were in but we had a lot of work ahead of us.
The Leap of Faith
As a racing driver, leaps of faith are bad ideas. I talk about it in my book Optimum Drive. Be rational and incremental, earn your speed step by step. It is sound advice but there is a problem. Some setups especially on aero cars feel so bad when they are driven slowly that you never feel safe enough, confident enough to get into the window where the car is actually working. Supercross bikes are the same way, the suspension is so stiff that unless you are a Supercross rider that can comfortably hit those jumps with full commitment you’ll swear the suspension is broken, locked solid. Aero cars and racing tires work the same way, they operate in a window that it takes years of experience to reach. OK, now try that on a crazy surface that is much bumpier that any track and you see the problem. It’s so much harder to reach the operating window so it never feels happy. I had to trust the aero so much more than when I had driven similar cars on smooth track, that it turns out, is relatively easy. The other factor of course is safety. Pikes Peak is a mountain road, not just bumpy but narrower than a normal race track, about a 1/3 to ½ narrower in fact. Then there is the cost of failure, no gravel traps, paved run-off zones, buffers of any kind, in most places there are no guardrails protecting you from the cliff rocks and drops. So, add the leap of faith comments to the safety comments and you see why driver confidence and comfort pushing the car to the limit are difficult to achieve but essential if success is to be the outcome. Dropping one wheel off could not only hurt you physically but it could do so much damage that you would be out of the event. The pavement may be undulating bumpy and narrow but it’s a good bit better than going off the road.
The Grind
We had discovered when I had pushed the car on the final run at the Pikes Peak Tire Test that the car was darty, the suspension got better as I pushed harder but was still not nearly ideal. We decided to put in a slower ratio steering rack to reduce the twitchiness. The problem was that the car and Cody were now in Michigan and I was not and we needed to test it locally, as luck would have it there was a Gridlife event that weekend Gingerman Raceway so I drove out there and hoped in the car for what I hoped was a productive day of testing. Three laps for 20 hours of driving, that’s what I got, two flying laps after a warm up and oil spewing out of the too small catch can then started a small fire that burned ignition wires and ended our day. Was it a wasted trip? Far from it, the steering was much improved, we had taken a large step forward.
Race Week
#teamnosleep had a list a mile long to complete and very little time to do it, it was race week and we had to test at LaJunta one last time before we were locked into inflexible raceweek with all its traditions, procedures (like tech inspection) and finally testing and racing got into full swing. The oil and cooling systems were all getting major revisions, the whole crew had arrived for the most part and it was all hands on deck for the LaJunta test. You see we could do 10 minute runs there once on the mountain it would be very hard to tell if we have solved out cooling problems with the mountain segments only being a few minutes. I get in the car, the engine guys have been busy, the boost is up, we are making serious horsepower now, it makes me smile. I like really fast cars for some reason they suite me, they make me happy therefore boost makes me happy. I was happy, the car flew, power changes cars, it was easier to get into the window, everything came alive, became harmonious, you could feel all of Seb’s areo complement Cody’s chassis and Aric’s (and Manuel’s) setup it was glorious until the rear wing exploded at 170MPH. I once again dutifully brought the car back to the pits, it had been less than ten minutes so we didn’t know about the cooling system and we now had to figure out how to build of rebuild a disintegrated wing in less than 24 hours to pass tech inspection. Back to the bat cave (Cole’s spotless shop, RPM Performance).
It was frustrating for everyone, two steps forward one step back but then you just had to remember this is a one off custom design and not some show car. We were trying to progress the car in a few weeks what should have taken months if not years. The fact that there were steps forward happening was a minor miracle. On the outside the car made every day and every run on the mountain if not for the PTSD symptoms displayed by the team each morning you’d think we had simply put in it the trailer each day after we ran it and then pulled it out at the track the next morning…boy was that not the case.
Cody is Calm?
We were all back at the shop, carbon jigsaw puzzle laying on the floor. We are stressing but we are not talented fabricators… Cody just looks at the mess and knows he can put it back together. I am not so sure, I think back to my earliest days driving and Paul Ricard Circuit, standing at the spot Elio De Angelis died…from a broken rear wing. You remember moments like that all your life. Then I thought I’ll be up on a mountain road in a car faster than Elios F1 car. I made a phone call, like when a doctor gives you news you don’t want to accept, you want a second opinion. This was Cody’s first carbon fiber word he had ever done but I happen to be friends with a guy that has a resume’ in carbon that has stretched for decades and to the extremes of that magical material. His name is Eric Strauss and he is completely nuts… he fit in immediately. I shouldn’t have been worried, Eric saw the master fabricators work after dropping everything to come a rescue me and simply said…”that’ll work”. Cody is calm.
Cody is not just calm, he is also the man. All of this was for him, he is magnetic, everyone there sucked into his dream. We all desperately wanted to make it happen for him like some crazy idea that seemed brilliant at the time, with your best friends, in a tree fort, when you were 11. Only we aren’t 11, we had developed skills and resources, we now could actually accomplish things now not just stare up at the branches swaying in the wind and the clouds drifting by dreaming.
Dreaming is Easy, Life is Hard
As per usual for #teamnosleep we cut things close and get to tech inspection with minutes to spare. As soon as we roll the car out of the trailer the crowd is there, the cameras are clicking. The car and Cody have a surprisingly huge internet following. It has to do of course with the underdog absurdity of it all. You simple don’t just build a prototype in your shop and take it to Pikes Peak. You build a Subaru or an EVO, maybe a Porsche or a GTR. Those are known cars with a performance backgrounds and strong aftermarket support. You just need money to buy stuff that already exists on a shelf somewhere. That’s not Cody’s DNA. Nothing off the shelf was going to threaten an overall on the mountain, that was done by prototypes and prototypes cost millions to build and run, unless you are Cody who welds like a demon and learns carbon fiber like Neo learns Kung Fu in the Matrix. The internet loves people like Cody, people we can all vicariously live through.
The tech inspection team also seems charmed by the Enviate sitting there looking like, well, a million bucks. We breezed through tech, could have sworn I heard Cody say “these are not the droids you are looking for” several times. Whatever, it worked, the only fix was shortening the seat belts slack. We were in shock and Cody was just smirking “told ya’ so”.
On Mountain Testing Begins
We were feeling pretty good considering. It was dark, cold 4:30 AM and we at 13,000ft waiting for the sun to come up. Car was ready, many fixes in place, rear wing now stuffed with aluminum and rivets, cooling system, catch can systems all new and improved. Strapped in minutes after sunrise and off we go. What do I notice? Car is all over the place bumps are yanking the wheel out of my hands and I catching air in places which is fine if I’m trying to set a world record with Hot Wheels for jumping distance in a truck (like I did with Tanner Foust in 2011). This though is a car with two very generous inches of total wheel travel (for a prototype) not a Baja truck. It was the most scared I had ever been on the mountain. Mainly I was surprised, on the racetrack the car was fun, predictable and balanced but that crazy undulating surface from the tire test was so much worse on the top. We thought we had solved it with the slower ratio steering rack but now on the bigger bumps on the top section I realized it was much worse that we thought. Luckily this was an optional day and that meant we would get to try the top again before the race on Sunday. Our experienced competitors flew, we were slow with big gaps to the front. This was not going to be easy, I was quiet on the way down, the mountain had humbled me, there was much work to do (#teamnosleep).
Qualifying
As luck would have it the very first day of official practice was our qualifying. The field was broken up into three groups and out of the three days whenever you were on the lower section that was your qualifying run. It happened to be our first day. The bottom is fast and it’s also the longest section from the start to Glen Cove. We had a very robust debrief after day one and fortunately the smart guys on the team (everyone but me basically) had corrected my assumptions on what to do next with the suspension. I wanted to go softer thinking all of that jarring and bouncing was caused by the suspension was too stiff (because it felt so good on the racetrack) but it turns out that our fancy third heave springs were actually too soft and we weren’t too stiff, we were bottoming, we actually needed to be much stiffer. Counter intuitive in a way but absolutely correct. The car was transformed with much of the dartiness banished to a bad memory. One the third run we slapped on the Soft tires fresh off the warmers at 200F and went for a time. The warmed tires felt amazing and I was finally getting into a rhythm in a 1000hp high downforce car rocketing up a narrow mountain road. I was sure we would be second or so which would really help our start position race day. Unfortunately two minutes in a wire (we later found out) to one of the water pumps got pinched and shorted out causing the car to immediately overheat I nursed it to the finish much slower that the cars potential but still good enough for what it turns out would be seventh overall. From that moment though failing pump aside that we were competitive on the mountain (not just setting lap records on smooth racetracks), the car worked here, Cody, Sebastien and Aric were right, this missile was a true modern Pikes Peak Special.
Fast is One Thing…
The whole this about racing that attracts us in the first place is the shear speed. Speed alone rarely ever wins races. It is consistency and consistency comes from two things reliability and predictability. It is the objective science saying the package is known, we understand it, can control it and therefore predict it. From that we get a feeling: Trust, when a driver can trust the car they can do something almost magical, they can become one with the car they can flow…together. This is where real speed comes from. I know that’s not what people outside of racing want to believe they want us to be crazy but we are not we are more like meditating monks who happen to be controlling something going hopefully extraordinarily fast. (personal plug: if this seems remotely interesting to you pick up my book Optimum Drive). Enviate and I now had the beginnings of trust and the times showed it was, reliability problems aside, the second fastest car on the mountain.
Them’s the Brakes
One thing I haven’t mentioned was the brake package, common sense tells Pikes Peak drivers not to use carbon brakes, the reason is warm up time, they don’t work until about 800F (up to about 1400F) so for the first few miles you have basically no brakes, not good. RPS though had a new process that allowed the brakes to work at 300F, that’s easy to get to, especially if you have 1000hp, just the odd drag of the left foot while on the gas will get them in range and they are ready to go before you need them (very important point). I’m the lucky guy that first got to try them on the mountain and they are staggeringly great brakes. Power is absurd (with Seb’s areo in full effect), modulation easy and granular release characteristics (for all you trailbreakers out there). Best brakes I have ever used and this car demanded no less than that.
Middle Section
The mountain is very different top to bottom. Curvy flowing and fast surrounded by trees gives way to stop and go ultra-narrow hairpins as you climb above tree line. Very different rhythm and challenge. Strangely enough on paper you’d think our car wouldn’t like the stop and go middle section while in reality it is really good at it. You see Cody and Aric didn’t just replicate a Le Mans car they knew the speed of Pikes Peak were much lower and on some of the hairpins you go as slow as 25mph. Our car is just rear wheel drive but it has more static weight on the back than a normal mid-engine car so it launches of any corner like it was a drag car and I already told you how good the RPS brakes are so yea, this thing works everywhere.
Slow is Fast?
So, the last day of practice arrives, back to Devils Playground at 13,000FT. Another all-nighter adding this time five more degrees of caster to the mix, nut and bolt the entire car (every night), corner weighted, aero tweaks. I don’t know the half of what gets done to the car every night, you want to know why? I’m sleeping that’s why, they kick me out, they want me fresh and ready in the morning, it feels terrible leaving them at 10PM when you know they are going to show up at the house at 1AM only to have to get up at around 2AM, but they are right. It’s a waste of all their effort if I’m too wiped to focus. For this I am eternally grateful to them, the selflessness. So, I go out on my first run, taking it easy, un-warmed tires, just a shakedown like I do every morning. It turns out we go second quickest and are within 1.4 seconds of Romain Dumas…The King of the Mountain. This is getting interesting. Fog rolls in and closes the curtain on a very productive practice week. The car has gone from scary undriveable to a real contender. Golf clap for an amazing crew.
Fan Fest
Colorado Springs really embraces the Hill Climb and the Friday of race week they shut down downtown and we set up and sign autographs and fire up the car on the two step (a drag launch system that builds boost by dumping fuel and igniting it after the cylinders) crating a serious racket that really gets the thousands of fans whipped up into a fervor (hopefully just short of looting or stripping the car for souvenirs). Good fun and a nice change of pace from the never stop, never done mentality of the practice day.
Show Time
We meet at the gate at 11:30PM and sleep until 2AM then head up and sleep in the car at the start line until 6AM or so than go to the drivers meeting, try to find a place to brush your teeth and have a cup of tea. Ah the glamor of racing right there. So, with my uncut hair pointing in ten directions and feeling a bit groggy and sore (not a camping fan, nor a car sleeping aficionado) we wait. The car is ready, I have been driving the mountain every day for hours after practice, doing low speed loops on the next-days section, endless loops until I can feel my brain shutting off and nothing more to be gained. It’s fun to think as putter around with the tourists how somehow I get to come back the next morning and drive this same section of road in a car that is not remotely street legal and one of the fastest racecars in the world and have the same rangers that watch with an eagles eye for a hint of speeding on public days cheer me on as I rip past them in the racecar at 150MPH. Love Pikes Peak.
I’m very relaxed at the start line, I’m not always relaxed but I am today. The universe seems content, the car seems ready, the team confident. What I should mention is that if we flash backwards 24 hours we would realize that the entire thing almost fell to pieces on a road by the shop and that the car had had a serious rebuild to have me sitting on the start line period let alone calm.
Remember the fog that shut down the final day of practice? It actually had Rob from RPS a little concerned, you see the carbon brakes like moisture, if the humidity goes up the brakes absorb the water and it comes out the next time you get the water to boil. It comes out as steam and creates a frictionless layer between the pads and rotors. Frictionless brakes? What a terrible idea, so Rob insisted we run the car at the shop and get the steam out. Fine idea except we also managed to get a bunch of steam out of the engine and into the cooling system just as Cody’s vision was blurring as the boost hit (true story). That meant only one thing and it wasn’t good. We had blown head gaskets, the engine needed to come apart and we needed to be loaded into the mountain at no later than 6PM for the race the next day. At 5:55PM Enviate rolls through the gates Pikes Peak, one more miracle added to a now, rather long list.
The light turns green. I am off, engine feels strong, grip good with a touch of new high speed oversteer. Make a note: Easy on the rear tires, they have to last so I back it down a notch from full kill mode and try to keep flowing. The road is going by fast, remember we only do it by sections so it feels very different to drive the whole thing and there are people everywhere waving, this feels cool, this feels special. Driving something this fast on a road like this in front of thousands of people. Through the picnic grounds foot to the floor, if I get to the shift lights in fourth that will be around 150MPH which will be (and was) faster than anyone that day. Turn after turn, they are all weird, unique not like a racetrack, the mountain decided how this road flowed and it feels nothing like a racetrack, the rhythm is different and better, less antiseptic more real, like The Nurburgring, it isn’t watered down. It’s a car that performs like an F1 car on a normal road and we are climbing at an alarming rate as I get up past Elk Park I notice something else climbing at an alarming rate… the oil temp. I quickly glance to the left and the rock steady 190F of water temp is now 207F and climbing, we are in trouble, not even half way up with the stop and go W’s to contend with before the ultra-fast road and thin air at the top section. My mission has now changed from victory to survival, I must finish for the team, too much work, too many naysayers, I had to get to the top. That meant short shifting (not going to redline) and once you get into top gear holding throttle to maximize airflow while minimizing load hopefully meaning the engine stays alive as it transitions from water to air cooled (something it was never designed to obviously do). All temps were off the scale the engine could/should seize at any moment but I was still somehow going, as I cleared the W’s I knew I was getting close, carving corners, late on the wonderful carbon brakes trying to balance time loss with reaching the top. With my super efficiency mode engaged I was trying to carry more speed where I could because it would help airflow and get me to the top faster but I was almost fired of the mountain at the notoriously bumpy patches just before Cog Cut, settle down re-focus, less than a mile to go. The mountain wasn’t quite finished with me yet though. One more hairpin, Olympic corner is approached by a fast top of third bumpy right hander as I exit the corner and line up braking for Olympic I do my little coast to keep the engine alive then go for the brakes, as soon as I downshift the engine dies, I release the clutch in second and nothing try it again in first, nothing then the car just stops. 150 yards from the finish in the middle of the corner. I hit the starter and it barely turns over. I flip off the water pumps (air pumps at that point!?) to give the starter more juice and it turns over faster but still won’t fire, what to do next? Well I am from Colorado and live on a very steep mountain and there have been many times where I have re-fired a car by bump starting it in reverse. Put it in reverse, let of the brake, cranked the wheel so I don’t back off the cliff and GO! The engine immediately fires, I stick it in first and blast across the line. WE… HAVE… DONE… IT!
The car built in a shop by a guy in a place that has perpetual winter and darkness has just finished 2nd in Unlimited class after sitting on the mountain stalled for over 30 seconds. The last and final miracle has occurred. Cody Loveland beats the mountain or maybe more fittingly shows what can be done if you just believe, have the grace under pressure to stay calm and the perseverance to see it through… until the very top.
The drive down after the race is one of motorsports true magical moments (made even more magical since the car actually started after a few hours of sitting, waiting for the rest of the field to finish). All the competitors parade down together after the last car has finished and those marvelous fans line the course and cheer as we all idle down high-fiving thousands of people, it is actually very emotional. It is a very satisfying thing just to make it to the top and the appreciation shown by the fans really magnifies that and it sinks in on that long slow and very hands on ride down. When you finally do arrive at the bottom and see the smiles on the teams faces that really cements the satisfaction of the accomplishment. As racers though, you never stop planning so as soon as I was out of the car and saw Cody we were already thinking
Photo credit: Larry Chen
Me: “Cody, let’s do it again in 2018, I’m sure with some refinements and testing we can get the record”
Cody: “OK” …Cody is calm.