If you follow Leith Mitsubishi’s blog or Facebook page, you’ve probably heard about the stunning performance of the Mitsubishi team at Pikes Peak in June. Thanks to GTChannel and GoPro, you can now hear and see that performance from a near first-person perspective.
If you don’t like high-pitch noises, you may want to turn the volume down a few notches:
The most striking thing about this video is the immediate acceleration. We’ve driven EVs before, but we still aren’t used to the instantaneous torque provided by electric motors, and the MiEV Evolution III that Greg Tracy was driving has four of them – one for each wheel. Tracy slows down to take turns, just as any other driver would, but this doesn’t cost him nearly as much momentum as it does conventional cars because he is able to get back up to top speed almost immediately.
The other aspect of the video that jumps out at us is the landscape as it flies by. We don’t just mean how fast it goes past, but how much it varies as it does. They call it the race to the clouds, but it’s not until you watch a run from inside the car that you really appreciate it. This race covers a vertical distance of five thousand feet. You can see the peak in the distance at the start and be stunned by the end as the car zooms along the winding mountain road.
Tracy completed the race in only 9:08.188, securing first place in the EV Division and second place overall. He was only two seconds away from an overall first place finish. This remarkable feat of engineering by Mitsubishi may shape the future of motorsports, and people will certainly be looking to Tracy’s run as they learn how to handle EV racecars.