Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—If you drive the 12.4-mile (20 km), 156-corner route up Pikes Peak, abiding by the posted speed limit of 25 mph (40 km/h), it will take you a good 30 minutes to reach the top. That’s assuming you resist the urge to stop and gawk at the infinite vistas that surround you along the way.
On Sunday, professional racer JR Hildebrand covered that same distance in just 9.5 minutes, ignoring the scenery all the while. He did it in a 1,250 hp (932 kW) hybrid-powered Corvette ZR1X, a car that you can take home yourself for about $210,000. It set a new production car record for the hybrid on a day when EVs and combustion-powered cars fought for mountain supremacy.
2026 marked the 104th running of the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb, one of the most historic races on the planet. Since its inception, competitors have struggled not only to string together all those corners but to maintain speed all the way to the 14,115-foot (4,302 m) summit.
Up there, the air is so thin that climbing a flight of stairs can be a proper struggle. It’s just as hard on a combustion engine, which traditionally loses up to half of its power at the summit. The use of forced induction—turbocharging or supercharging—helps to mitigate that, but lately, the focus of many manufacturers has been on cars that don’t need to breathe at all.
The current Pikes Peak record is held by an EV, the insane Volkswagen I.D. R Pikes Peak, which made the climb in an astonishing 7:57 back in 2018, with French endurance racing legend Romain Dumas at the wheel. Dumas was back this year with Ford, running an upgraded version of the company’s wild, three-motor, 1,400-horsepower (1,060 kW) Super Mustang Mach-E.
It’s basically the same car that ran an abbreviated, weather-shortened course last year. Zach Burns, Program Engineer for demonstrators at Ford, told me that the team spent the past year optimizing the aerodynamics and suspension of the car as much as possible, working with Dumas in the simulator to optimize things.
But there’s no way to simulate all the variables of real life, particularly the weather. “The mountain is an ever-changing beast,” Burns told me. “Luckily, this year it’s been fairly great.”
Dumas was after overall honors, but ahead of the race, Burns told me that the competition this year was fierce: “I would love to say where we’re going to be. I think we’re very competitive within our class, and we’ll see how we do on the overall.”
Things weren’t necessarily looking great in the lead-up to Sunday. The Ford was out-qualified by some V8-powered competition: the open-wheel Sendycar V1, driven by Robin Shute, and the Nova Proto NP01 ATM Bardahl, driven by Simone Faggioli. All three feature different approaches to generating speed and grip, but only the Mustang relied on electric power.
The competition was just as fierce in the production class. Before this year, the production record was held by a 2022 Porsche 911 Turbo S that was pulled off the production line, outfitted with a roll cage and a fuel cell, and then sent up the hill at the hands of local legend David Donner in 9 minutes and 53 seconds.
This year, that car was back, again at the hands of Donner and again running the 000 number in the hopes of repeating the magic.
These three were dicing for top production honors, and only the Corvette added some electrification to the mix. Hildebrand’s ZR1X mixes a 5.5 L twin-turbocharged V8 at the back with an electric motor at the front, producing that eye-watering 1,250 hp (932 kW) figure, almost twice that of the record-holding 000 Porsche.
But that’s before you factor in the altitude. “The engine is down a couple-hundred horsepower, still making in the 700 hp range at the top,” Stefan Frick told me. He’s an energy performance engineer on the team responsible for the ZR1X. “The turbochargers definitely help with that as well.”
Frick confirmed that no software tweaks to the car are needed to enable that performance at altitude. It’s running a stock tune, with Hildebrand choosing the “Race 1” traction setting to minimize wheelspin.
That car started its life as a development mule before being refitted for Pikes Peak duty with the mandatory roll cage and fuel cell, which Chevrolet’s engineers opted to mount in the trunk.
“We drilled the holes in and put safety equipment in it,” GM Executive Chief Engineer Tony Roma told me. “It’s every bit a representative car.”
While GM’s engineers prepped the car in the months leading up to the event, Hildebrand spent some time digitally training. “I’ve had a lot of time in racing simulators over the years,” he said, including plenty of serious machines provided by various race teams.
While there’s a big difference between those multi-million-dollar rigs and what you can do at home, Hildebrand said there’s value even there: “There are a couple of different video games that have a pretty good representation of the course. For me, that’s really just to kind of get in the cadence of the 156 corners.”
Hildebrand also prepared by running the car at GM’s proving grounds in Milford, Michigan, but there’s no replacement for time on the mountain itself. “The track grip is always super low. It never rubbers in. It is not the pavement of a racetrack; it’s literally just a street,” Hildebrand said.
This fundamental lack of grip, plus the unpredictable nature of the course, mean all-wheel drive can be a real advantage. “I think there’s a major advantage to an all-wheel drive car here, though there are differing opinions on that. Some say that the weight penalty of all-wheel drive offsets the advantage of traction out of turns,” Pete Stout, cofounder at 000, said.
His team’s 911 Turbo S mixes all-wheel drive with rear-wheel steering to add some extra agility, but the electric front axle on the Corvette gives it a particular advantage in a few areas, including traction control.
“It makes it all easier to function with the hybrid, especially taking away power,” said Matt Foley, crew chief on the 000. Traditional traction control either cuts power to the engine, slowing all four wheels, or applies the brakes to the spinning wheels, which wears them out more quickly. “With the hybrid, you can literally just pull power out of the front,” he said.
But in the Corvette, its primary purpose is to provide instant, quick response in every corner, from the bottom to the top, something that particularly impressed Hildebrand in the extremely low-speed hairpins.
“Whatever car you’re in, no matter how much horsepower it has, you’re always waiting for it to get up in the power band and start building momentum off the corners,” Hildebrand told me. “This thing is just like ‘POP!’ It just pulls the car up into the second-gear RPM band, and it’s off to the races.”
Add to that the ability to efficiently vector torque across the front axle under both acceleration and deceleration, and you have a car that mixes some of the extra control and finesse offered by electrification with the brute power of internal combustion.
It ultimately proved a winning combination, as Hildebrand’s ZR1X beat Jeff Zwart’s 911 GT2 RS by 14 seconds and came in 23 seconds sooner than Donner’s Turbo S, which climbed the mountain in 9:53.740. That’s just two-tenths off of his 2022 record time, a remarkable exhibition of consistency.
Whether it is the outright production record, though, is something of a topic of debate. Chevrolet is clearly treating this as a new outright record for a production car on the mountain. Pikes Peak regulations for production cars, however, seems to exclude hybrids, making the ZR1X the fastest production hybrid.
Regardless, it was an EV that came out on top again. Romain Dumas did indeed put down the fastest time of the day at 8:18.202. He fell short of his own 2018 record by 21 seconds but took the overall win by 11 seconds over the Sendycar V1, which set a new record as the fastest rear-drive car ever.
Hybrid, electric, and good ol’ internal combustion all had something to cheer about this past Sunday, but as usual, the real goal is selling on Monday.
