Romain Dumas: ‘You need an EV to win at Pikes Peak’
Eyeing a sixth outright Pikes Peak victory this weekend, Ford’s Romain Dumas explains why electric power is key to winning the world’s toughest hillclimb.
Meet Romain Dumas. Dumas is French, 47 years old, and remains the fastest man ever at Pikes Peak thanks to his 2018 run with the all-electric Volkswagen ID.R.
Dumas’ seven minute, 57.148 second blast towards the 14,115-foot summit of “America’s Mountain” was so rapid, it surprised even his employer. Initially, VW had intended to use the ID.R’s 2018 Pikes Peak debut as a test run, with a view to a proper assault on the 12.42-mile, 156-corner “race to the sky” the following year.
Dumas and the 670bhp, 1,100kg ID.R didn’t just beat Sébastien Loeb’s 8:13.878 then-record in their first attempt, they obliterated it. Satisfied with their work, VW simply didn’t bother returning the following year. The ID.R Pikes Peak programme was effectively cut short.
While Wolfsburg had packed up and gone home, Dumas wasn’t quite finished. He made his Pikes Peak debut with his own outfit in 2012, and won the event outright in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Trophies were still there for the taking.
And when it comes to scoring outright wins at some of the world’s most prestigious motorsport events, Dumas has form. He won the 24 Hours of Le Mans with Audi in 2010, and scored a second LM24 victory with Porsche six years later.
Nurturing a love for Pikes Peak from an early age
Pikes Peak isn’t just something Dumas fancied doing after calling time on his sports car career. He’s nurtured his love for hillclimb – and Pikes Peak especially – since his early years.
“Hillclimb racing has had a big following in France since the 1960s, so Pikes Peak was something really big like Le Mans, or the Monte Carlo Rally when I was growing up,” he tells EV Powered. “In my younger years karting, I said ‘that’s a race I want to do one day’ so that’s how it all really began and I first went with my own team in 2012.
“At Pikes Peak, I was always interested in how the course changes,” he continues. “In some places it’s a bit like circuit racing because it’s very fast and sweeping, and then the more technical, tight sections aren’t dissimilar to rallying.”
Given Dumas is a racing driver, the element of risk plays into his love for the world’s foremost hillclimb.
Unlike Spa or Silverstone where Dumas won races in his endurance racing career, Pikes Peak has no run-off areas. Instead, the run to the summit plays host to ominously-monikered corners named “Devils Corner” and “Bottomless Pit”.
If you crash, you crash hard or worse. Since the first Pikes Peak hillclimb in 1916, the mountain has claimed the lives of seven runners and riders.
“If you have an issue, it can be very dangerous,” says Dumas. “The course starts with roads like we have in Europe, then the second part is this wide, open space with all of these drops either side.
“During the last five or six kilometres, you’re about 5,000 feet above sea level. It’s very dry, and there are no trees, nothing. It’s also very bumpy. You may as well be racing on the moon at this point.
“Over the duration of the course, you have to deal with different types of road, altitude, and surface changes. This makes it not just tough for us drivers, it’s also a big challenge for the engineers and manufacturers who need to come up with a car that can handle these three very different profiles.”
Where ‘no rules’ meet the benefits of EV power
Many of the successes in Dumas’ career were driven by the internal combustion engine. However, his acceptance of the VW ID.R drive was motivated by two things: the first, a general interest in electric vehicles; the second, that VW would be taking on the top-tier, Unlimited class at Pikes Peak.
Without getting too technical, Unlimited is essentially a free-for-all, a playground for race engineers and carmakers. As long as their car meets the general rules set out by the race organisers and passes their safety inspection, anything goes.
“It’s incredible that there are basically no rules, and all you need is essentially a roll cage and a belt to compete at Pikes Peak. I love it!” laughs Dumas. “You can basically do whatever you want, and that’s where electric motors and batteries come in.
“When you race in a car with a ‘normal engine’, altitude affects the power – the higher you go and the thinner the air gets, the more the engine struggles to breathe” he continues. The French veteran isn’t wrong. It’s estimated that ICE-powered cars at Pikes Peak can experience a 40% reduction in power by the time they reach the top.
Back to Dumas.
“With electric power, you get instant torque and you’re not affected by the altitude change. You don’t need to change gear with an EV either, so that helps because each shift you make, you lose a hundredth of a second here and there, or even more when you get it wrong – that’s one of the very first things I learned in karting 30 years ago.
“I would say that you need an EV to win at Pikes Peak now, that’s for sure.”
Very, very fast all-electric Fords and Pikes Peak
Dumas’ mention of being crowned “King of the Mountain” a sixth time at Pikes Peak throws up the opportunity to discuss the Blue Oval’s 2025 Pikes Peak challenger, which he’ll be driving for honors on June 22.
Should Dumas claim victory, he’ll be tied second in the all-time Pikes Peak winners list alongside Nobuhiro ‘Monster’ Tajima, the Japanese driver who claimed the outright win in 1995 with that twin-engined Suzuki Escudo. If – like me – you are of a certain vintage and spent much of the late 1990s playing Gran Turismo 2, you know exactly who and what I’m talking about.
Segues into all-time classic PlayStation games aside, Dumas’ car for this 103rd running of Pikes Peak is the Ford Super Mustang Mach-E, the successor to the 1,600bhp F-150 Lightning SuperTruck he drove to victory last year despite having to reset the car mid-stage.
The technical issue saw Dumas lose 26 seconds. Nonetheless, he still achieved a time of 8:53.563, around seven seconds ahead of his nearest competitor.
In 2023, Pikes Peak saw Dumas tackle the mountain with the Fastest of Fords, the SuperVan 4.2. With 2,000bhp, and a twin-frame chassis, this was no regular Transit. Victory eluded Dumas that time. Nonetheless, he still finished second, some seven seconds adrift of eventual winner Robin Shute.
Like the SuperTruck and the SuperVan before it, the Ford Super Mustang Mach-E adopts a tri-motor, all wheel-drive setup co-developed with Austrian EV motorsport specialists, STARD.
Dumas reveals that the 1,400bhp car with its physics-defying 3,130kg of downforce is an evolution of everything Ford has learned from Pikes Peak over the previous two years.
“We’re still using the same tri-motor layout, same drivetrain, and same high-performance 50kWh battery we used in 2024 and 2023, so we’re now really maximising what we have,” he explains. “We’re playing with the torque vectoring a little bit more now, and we’ve improved things to produce 710kW of regenerative braking to top up the battery.
“The biggest difference is the car itself, though. We started with the Transit SuperVan, then went to the SuperTruck, which was a bit lower. The Super Mustang Mach-E will be even lower still, so that gives us a lower centre of gravity and better drag, which results in better downforce.
“To be honest with you, it feels and looks like a proper GT car. Given we’ve not changed any of the powertrain, our times should come from the improvements we’ve made to the lower chassis and the downforce we’re generating.”
Becoming ‘King of the Mountain’
Given Ford’s recent form at Pikes Peak combined with its illustrious motorsport history, a fiver on Dumas taking his sixth wouldn’t be the worst bet you could make.
Nonetheless, he remains wary of the experimental aspect of the Unlimited class, plus the mental and physical aspects involved with the hillclimb. From start to finish, the drivers will undergo an elevation change of 4,730 feet.
“First thing I think we need to be wary of at Pikes Peak, is that someone could turn up with a car much lighter than ours, a 600kg prototype or something, with similar power, and blow everyone away,” he says. “Secondly, driving an electric race car is a very different experience to driving an ICE – you don’t have gear changes or anything to gauge your speed. The only feedback you have is where to look.
“Relying solely on your vision makes things difficult, because you can easily enter a corner or the end of a straight three, four, five kilometres per hour faster than you would like if you’re not properly focused. Even though it’s not a huge amount of speed, that can still ruin your exit, and the whole run can end up in a disaster.
“There’s a lot more thinking that goes into driving an electric race car than some people expect – it’s not simply a case of putting your foot down and off you go. On top of the mental side of things, the altitudes we reach at Pikes Peak and the lack of oxygen make things even harder because you get super tired. At the end of the day, it’s just really, really dangerous.”
Yet for all of his downplaying, you still wouldn’t bet against Romain Dumas and Ford, would you?
