Ten minutes and 48 seconds. In that amount of time, one car and one driver managed to cover nearly 13 miles of pure dirt, slice through more than 150 curves and climb to a 4,301 meter peak located in the Colorado mountains. That man was Walter Röhrl and the car was the utterly legendary Audi Sport quattro S1 and to make matters even more impressive, this was all done in 1987. Fast forward to 2012, and 25 years after the two icons climbed to the clouds, they plan on making an encore by running up the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb rally course one more time.
Colorado’s most prestigious racing event has gone through some serious changes since Röhrl broke the record in 87. Since then, faster times have been recorded but on the altered, paved version of the course. Even still, the current best time for the much less treacherous road is not even one minute faster than the time set by the monstrous Audi on pure dirt. Turbocharged beyond belief, the S1 put down 600 horsepower to all four wheels and still does to this day. Though not in race conditions, Röhrl will more than likely use all of those inline five cylinder’s ponies to attack the mountain so that Audi, rally, Pikes Peak and overall engineering fans can once again witness two legitimate icons defy reasonable thinking.
Source: Audi
