Romain Dumas is King of the Mountain again. At the 104th running of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb on June 21, the French driver guided the all-electric Ford Super Mustang Mach-E to the summit in 8 minutes 18.202 seconds, claiming what tyre supplier Pirelli describes as his sixth career title at the Colorado climb. The course is brutal by design: a 19.99-kilometre run with 156 corners that ends at 4,302 metres above sea level, where the air is thin, the surface keeps changing and grip is in short supply. The onboard footage published on the Pikes Peak channel puts you in the car for the full ascent, from the warm tarmac at the start line to the cold, exposed switchbacks near the top of the mountain, where a single small mistake can undo a run that has gone perfectly up to that point.
Pikes Peak has become one of the places where electric race cars answer a hard question: can a battery powertrain stay consistent when the weather changes faster than almost anywhere else in motorsport? Pirelli says the asphalt measured around 20 degrees Celsius at the start and dropped below freezing by the summit, a swing packed into fewer than twenty kilometres. That is the same challenge, in extreme form, that every road EV faces when a battery has to deliver and accept power across a wide temperature band. For a manufacturer like Ford, a clean run to the top is a public test of how well its electric hardware copes when it cannot be nursed. The buyer-facing version of the story is simple: the cars that do well here are the ones whose cooling and power delivery hold up under stress, which is exactly what matters on a long, hot, fast road journey. It is also why carmakers keep bringing electric prototypes to a course where altitude robs a combustion engine of air but leaves an electric motor's output largely untouched.
According to Pirelli, the result was not the runaway some had expected. Reigning champion Simone Faggioli had taken pole position on the Thursday before the race and, the supplier says, had dominated free practice and qualifying in the Nova Proto NP01 ATM Bardahl, making him one of the firm favourites for outright victory. On race day a technical problem during the climb compromised his run, and he came home third, a result Pirelli says still underlined how competitive the package was. The supplier notes that the two front-runners used very different rubber for the same mountain: Faggioli ran 13-inch P Zero Hillclimb tyres, while Dumas competed on 18-inch P Zero tyres derived from GT racing and optimised for the Ford electric car. Terenzio Testoni, Pirelli's rally activity manager and a co-ordinator of the project with circuit activity manager Matteo Braga, framed the day as a test of consistency above all, pointing to the temperature range between base and summit as the factor that separates a clean run from a compromised one.
Bottom line: a sixth Pikes Peak win is a serious tally, and doing it in an electric car on a course that punishes any weakness in cooling and power delivery is the part worth paying attention to. Trophies are fun, but the useful detail for anyone shopping for an EV is buried in that 20-degrees-to-sub-zero swing: the cars that win here are the ones that manage heat without drama. Faggioli's lost lead is a reminder that reliability still decides these days as much as outright pace. If you want a rough preview of which manufacturers have their battery thermal management sorted, the top of this mountain is not a bad place to look.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.