Pikes Peak, 1985: the year the outright record went to a woman, and stayed unmatched for four decades. Reading time: 4'
Near the top of Pikes Peak there is a sequence of fast sweepers where the road runs close to the drop, and in the summer of 1985 Michèle Mouton went through it with the throttle flat. She said afterwards that she could feel the car pulling towards the edge. "I decided not to lift." Everything about that afternoon is in those five words.
The driver they already knew
By then, Mouton was not a curiosity to anyone who followed rallying. She had won Sanremo in 1981, the first world championship rally ever won by a woman, and in 1982 she took three more wins for Audi and finished runner-up in the drivers' championship, twelve points behind Walter Röhrl. She did it in the Quattro, sideways, on the same stages and in the same era as Mikkola, Blomqvist and Röhrl himself. Nobody inside the sport doubted her speed. The doubting came from elsewhere.
The mountain
Pikes Peak is a hill climb in Colorado, and calling it that undersells it in every direction. The road climbs from around 2,800 metres to a summit at 4,301, through more than 150 corners, and in 1985 it was gravel, with no guardrails between the racing line and the view. Americans call it the Race to the Clouds. Engines lose their breath up there, the air thins with every switchback, and the drivers who ruled it were local dynasties who had been reading that mountain for generations. Above all, the Unsers.
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Where Endurance comes from Group B and the years around it are the territory the Endurance collection was drawn from. |
The run
Audi sent Mouton up the mountain in 1984 and she won her division first time out. In 1985 she came back with the Sport Quattro S1, the short, winged evolution of the car she knew from the world championship, homologated just days before race week: five cylinders, 476 horsepower, and four driven wheels on a surface that punished anything less. She reached the summit in 11 minutes 25.39 seconds. That was not just the fastest time of the day. It broke the outright record, held by Al Unser Jr., by almost thirteen seconds, on a mountain his family had treated as home ground for decades. First woman to win Pikes Peak outright. First non-American, too.
Watch: Pikes Peak, 1985.
What was said at the top
Not everyone at the summit was gracious about it. Some of the local rivals made their feelings known, and the story that has survived, told and retold for forty years now, is that Mouton offered to settle it by racing them back down the mountain. Whether the line came out exactly that way hardly matters at this point. What is documented is what she said about the run itself: that through the fastest section she felt the car drifting towards the drop, and pressed harder.
After
The record lasted one year. Bobby Unser took it back in 1986, in an Audi as it happens, and Walter Röhrl lowered it again in 1987. Records are like that. They pass through hands. What has not passed through anyone's hands since is the other mark: four decades on, Mouton is still the only woman to have won Pikes Peak outright. She left Audi after that summer, drove for Peugeot, and stepped away from top-level rallying when Group B ended. The mountain kept her name.
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The green of that era The Oliver carries a G15 lens. A pilot's green before it was a driver's. |
