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The most amazing record in motorsports?September 2, 2004 There are wins and there are wins. And then there's Rod Millen's 1994 record-breaking overall win at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, one of the world's premier motorsports events. In that one spectacular drive up a serpentine dirt road with over 156 turns, some of them with sheer drop-offs of 1,000 feet or more, Millen upset the world of hillclimbing - setting a record that remains unbroken even now, 10 years later. Even more amazing, he set the record on street-legal BFGoodrich® tires...in an event long-dominated by pure racing tires. Until 1987, no one had completed the 12.6 mile course in under 11 minutes, when it fell to 10:47 seconds. The record was broken again the following year – by 63/100s of a second. The 1988 record lasted five years, until 1993, when it was broken by 3.5 seconds. None of the competitors gave much thought to the idea of winning the race – let alone breaking the record – on street tires. Special race tires had been standard equipment on serious entries at Pikes Peak for decades. Until that day in 1994, when Rod Millen drove a Toyota Celica equipped with BFGoodrich street tires to an overall win and a record time that has yet to be equaled. When Millen broke the Pikes Peak record, he didn't just break it. He left it in tatters. In a production-based car, with BFGoodrich street-legal radials, a winning margin of five seconds would have been phenomenal. A ten-second margin would have been almost unimaginable. Millen broke the record by 39 seconds, surprising even himself. In testing before the race, the highly modified Celica (mid-engine, four-wheel drive, 850 HP motor) had shown sufficient speed to break the record. But not by that much. And Millen wasn't at all sure that he'd win the event overall even if he did break the record. There were a lot of very fast entries that year in an event that typically attracts not only hill veterans but factory entries from many of the world's leading auto makers. Millen, with the champion race driver's characteristic modesty about his own contribution to the win, attributes it to superior planning, engineering, road conditions and – of course – tires. BFGoodrich Comp T/A® tires. "We had street tires with a special compound," Millen says. "The grip levels were pretty damn good. It was a combination of things. Not only was the car and the 4WD system and the horsepower all optimal, the road conditions were right. It's a dirt road, and the texture of the surface and the moisture content of the dirt are critical." Millen's time of 10:04:06 has stood untouched for 10 years. How was he able to do it in 1994, and why has no one been able to beat his time since? "For 1994 we upped the ante by engineering and designing a superior machine," Millen says of the 4WD Celica, which featured full ground-effects bodywork, "and took advantage of that – not just brute force to drive the car up the hill, but the advantage of the latest technology to have a machine that did the job for you. "I can't help but believe that we were at the right place at the right time, with the right tire, the right compound – everything lined up, and we took advantage of really good road conditions that year to set the record. "In a race like that, it's critical that you have the right tire for the event, and especially for the road conditions. And we had them." BFGoodrich g-Force tires are the world's fastest street radials. BFGoodrich® g-Force T/A® Drag Radials hold the import and domestic street radial drag racing record ETs as of the following dates: Domestic: Dwayne "Big Daddy" Gutridge 8.05 @ 181 MPG on 11/23/03. Import: Paul Efantis 8.25 @ 170.8 on 10/05/03. They have also set the highest cornering mark The Tire Rack has ever recorded. Photo courtesy Rod Millen Group 
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