David Sent A Guy From His Apartment To Cover The Pikes Peak Race. Here’s How That Went

It’s three in the morning in the largely empty lobby of a rather environmentally conscious hotel. The only people there to greet me from the room’s leather couches are a handful of older white guys I’d be spending the weekend with and a security guard at the front desk with the big iron on his hip. “I put on a pot of coffee for y’all,” says the combination armed guard/desk receptionist. 

“Thank you,” we reply, before loading our thousands of dollars worth of gear into two brand spanking new Hyundai Santa Fe’s. We hit the road to make our way to the almighty, seemingly unconquerable, Pikes Peak.

[Full Disclosure: Hyundai invited us to Pike’s Peak this year, where the Ioniq 5 N was out strutting its stuff. We sent Griffin, a young, energetic, and just cool guy who used to live in my Studio City apartment building, and whom I bonded with over his lifted Jeep TJ and stickshift Mazda 3 daily driver (which he’s now changed to a C6 ‘Vette). Turns out: He works in the film industry and is a great shooter, and he loves cars. Apparently Hyundai took him on some rapids? I’m worried he now thinks our grueling industry is just some shrimp-eating boondoggle. From Griffin: “Thank you for taking me along the ride, Hyundai, and thank you for forcing me to get onto a raft in nearly class five rapids and hoping I didn’t drown. It was a blast.” We work hard, Griffin! Hard, I tell you! Anyway, back to Griffin. -DT]. 

As soon as we reached the mountain, we were greeted by several mile long lines and abysmal weather with visibility so poor that the surrounding cars disappear into the fog that flanks us.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Griffin Riley (@darkcrustacean)

Our car has Becky Evans of Top Gear fame, her videographer Patrick Whelan, Chris Rosales from Motor1 and Motorsports.com, and myself: the youngster who was told the first press trip of his career would be with Hyundai covering a race where a popped tire or snapped suspension arm or even something smaller could send a driver off a mountain, potentially to their death. This was was not going to be a cushy Porsche Cayenne press drive in the South of France, but I, a photographer, kinda of liked that.

The one thing we all have in common though? We’re damn tired, struggling for breath atop Devil’s Playground’s 13,000 feet, and we’re waiting for conditions to maybe change while watching a documentary about a professional English fraudster who allegedly impersonates footballers and robs his girlfriends for all they’ve got. It’s good vibes up here.

Here’s the thing I quickly learned that Friday morning: three layers was absolutely not enough to stay warm, but hugging a stack of tire warmers on full blast? Surprisingly effective!

The cars and the ones who drive them

Hyundai brought two variations of the IONIQ 5 N: the base production model whose extra seats had been removed and which had a cage added, and the TA Spec, which is a full time attack build with 37 extra horses at the rear and an insane aero kit to boot.

“Pikes peak is becoming a proving ground for electric technology,” said Ron Zaras, the pilot of the production-model SUV/hatchback. “There’s no other place I can think of where you see the huge disadvantage of (internal combustion engines).”

Zaras, best known for his work with Hoonigan and the late Ken Block, has only just started his professional racing career and felt like he was thrown in the deep end almost immediately.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The Autopian (@theautopian)

The beauty of the the electric powertrain for drivers like Zaras is that they offer access to power all the time, simply because they aren’t reliant on the increasingly thinning air as they approach the 14,115 foot summit. And just as important is the speed with which that power can be accessed; it’s instant.

“It’s so nice to have that power right off the bat,” he said about the over 600 horsepower machine he’s carving up the mountain. He added that most of their time comes from the middle sector filled with slow hairpins that immediately open to long straights that they can only just get on the power for.

“This kinda feels like a video game,” he said, the irony being that most of his time getting to know the track was through simulator time on the game Asetto Corsa. 

Hyundai’s three-car entry (it was initially four until Paul Dallenbach suffered a crash that broke his leg and pulled the car out of competition) marks the Korean brand’s first year back on the mountain since 2013. What’s even crazier is that the decision to race the car was one only made last December.

“Koreans are so quick,” said Till Wartenberg, Vice President of N Brand & Motorsport at Hyundai. “Bali, bali,” he said while referring to the decisive Korean ethos that loosely translates to “fast, fast,” or “hurry, hurry.”

The thing is: Hyundai never even cared about racing an EV, specifically. Wartenberg, whose last name aptly translates “waiting for the mountain,” said all they wanted to do was race a production car that you could buy in stores the next day. It just so happened that car was an EV. 

And from where I was standing: it looked like a pretty damn good machine.

Let’s go racing.

It’s Sunday morning, and we’ve got three cars itching to dump their batteries’ full power through their wheels to eat that early morning pavement.

The four car exhibition class that Hyundai was competing in ran first in the morning, with SCCA hall-of-famer and fellow journalist Randy “RFP” Pobst starting first in the #49 TA Spec. 

RFP’s 2024 go at Pikes Peak was a strange one. He was a last minute replacement for four time “King of the Mountain” Robin Shute, and Pobst found himself victim to a mechanical failure during Friday’s quali session that resulted in him not setting a time.

In other words: that means Pobst had to run at the mountain in a car he really didn’t know and on a track he hadn’t raced in years. A true recipe for success, right?

Honestly, yeah, kind of a success. Pobst piloted the #49 to a time of 9:55.551, which landed him at a shockingly high (all things considered) eighth place overall. Solid start to the day, right?

Next up for the Korean outfit: Ron Zaras in the production model. 

The mountain rookie surely terrified his wife, Lara, who joked on Friday that she needs “my own oxygen tank for when he takes off.” 

But she also acknowledged that Ron understands his limits when he’s on the track, and she’s clearly right on that end.  Zaras piloted his production spec car to a time of 10:49.267 which landed him in 26th place. Zaras’ closest competitor in class was a road based Rivian R1T with 1,025 horsepower that clocked a time of 10:53.883. If you’re keeping score, that means Zaras, who only started racing in the last couple of months, finished in the top half of the 60 total entries and finished ahead of a car with nearly 400 extra horses on tap. Still, the Rivian was clearly much heavier and larger, and it was cool seeing it racing out there.

Lastly for Hyundai we have Dani Sordo, whom you may know as a WRC driver — largely considered to be one of the best drivers to touch the pavement. With three rally wins to his name and 229 stage wins, you know that this car and driver pairing was meant to do great things, and you’d think right.

Sordo pulled the TA Spec Ioniq 5 N the whole way up the mountain to a blistering 9:30.852, landing the Spaniard in third place overall, only behind Christian Merli in a 2024 Wolf Aurobay GB08 2.0 HP and Romain Dumas in the absolutely unhinged Ford SuperTruck that boasts a whopping 1,600 horsepower and set a time of 8:53.553. (You can see the supertruck in the image below).

The TA Spec that Sordo and Pobst were driving? Just shy of 680 horsepower. Forty seconds slower in a car with less than half of the SuperTruck’s power isn’t anything to be ashamed of if you ask me. (It’s worth nothing that the SuperTruck had an issue that resulted in full power loss that took almost 30 seconds to restart).

Takeaways

Based on what I saw, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N seems like a hell of a car, and their results and all the circumstances around it seem to prove that. [Ed Note: Plus, anyone who’s driven the production model seems to love it, so it all tracks (pun intended). -DT]

Whether it’s pulling up just a few seconds shy of the unhinged, Frankensteined creation that is Ford’s SuperTruck or rookies going toe to toe against folks who have been doing this for years in cars with more power, Hyundai showed that the IONIQ 5 N and its TA Spec variant are here to make a name for themselves. 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Griffin Riley (@darkcrustacean)

And from what it sounds like, they aren’t done yet. “Yes, we will come back to Pikes Peak,” said Wartenberg. “Definitely.” Wartenberg feels that Korea is trendy right now, and it’s hard to argue otherwise considering the meteoric rise of K-pop and the catapulting of Korean filmmaking into the American zeitgeist via shows like Squid Games or movies like “Parasite.” With that in mind, Wartenberg feels like it’s their time to shine.

As for Zaras’ post-race plans? “First thing: I’m going to Denver Biscuit Company, getting a Bloody Mary, and probably some kind of fried chicken.” I hope you got that meal, Ron. You definitely earned it.

Overall results from the 2024 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb can be found here, and full stats and more details about the IONIQ 5 TA Spec can be found here.

[Ed Note: I’ll reiterate: We work hard, Griffin! -DT].