6 days ago
Michele Mouton Joins Pikes Peak Hall Of Fame As Group B Audi Celebrates Her Record-Breaking Run
Forty years ago, Michele Mouton piloted her Audi S1 E2 up Pikes Peak to set a new overall record of 11:25.39, beating all the men, including former record holder Al Unser, Jr. That would be her last trip to Pikes Peak in competition, as she leaft Audi at the end of the 1985 WRC season and professional rally altogether in 1986, though she's certainly kept busy since. To this day, she remains the only Queen of the Mountain among a long list of Kings dating back to 1916.
To commemorate this accomplishment, Mouton was inducted into the Pikes Peak Hall of Fame at the 103rd running of the event this past weekend. This was not the only celebration of her achievement, though. Frog Racing, an amateur rally and hillclimb team out of Massachusetts, joined forces with RayTeam Motorsport to enter a 1986 Audi S1 E2 in the race up the mountain in tribute to Mouton.
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Driver Emmanuel Cecchet is a fixture at New England rally and hillclimb events, both as a driver and a scrutineer. His wife, Margaret Sharron, races her own Subaru and is officially the fastest woman ever up Mount Washington. Despite extensive experience in the northeast, this would be his first visit to Pikes Peak. That's a lot of car to put into the hands of someone new to the mountain. To familiarize himself with it, he and RayTeam tested the Audi at Thompson Speedway, Mt. Ascutney, and the Okemo Hillclimb before heading to Colorado. Pikes Peak practice went well. The team displayed the car at Mouton's induction ceremony, where they also met the legend herself.
Unfortunately, wind gusts up to 120 mph at the summit forced organizers to shorten the course on race day, ending at Glen Cove at a mere 11,450 feet elevation. Between that and the fully paved road surface compared to the dirt that Mouton set her record on, there is no way to directly compare times. While Cecchet finished with a time of 5:09.043, that put him 16th in Open class and 56th overall.
But who cares? Cecchet wasn't there to win the race. He was there to commemorate the first, and so far only, woman to win the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Seeing the car out there, and especially hearing its unique inline-5 engine echoing off the mountainside, brought Pikes Peak history to life.
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