Pikes Peak Hillclimb museum re-opens as the Pikes Peak Hillclimb Experience

Photos by Tom Kimmell, courtesy El Pomar Foundation.

When hard times hit the organizers of the Pikes Peak Hillclimb about a decade and a half ago, they sacrificed the museum that once chronicled the history of the event, and no facility replaced it. Not, at least, until earlier this year, when the Penrose Heritage Museum doubled in size to tell the history of the country’s second-oldest motorsports event using some of the cars that raced it.

“With the museum, we’ve tried to honor as much of the hillclimb’s early history as possible,” said Mitch Snow, the hillclimb’s new director of promotions and legacy, regarding the Pikes Peak Hillclimb Experience. “We’ve got everything from Louis Unser’s driving suit and boots to the old leather helmets the competitors wore to the all-magnesium car that Al Unser drove to win the race.”

That car, the Conze Special (above), which Unser drove in 1960 and which spent the last several years in the Unser Racing Museum in New Mexico, is one of a handful of vehicles that were in the original museum and that have now returned to take up residency in the new museum.

In the works since 2012, when the organizers of the hillclimb finished paving the 12-mile road to the top of Pikes Peak, the $3 million, 4,000-square-foot addition to the existing Spencer Penrose Carriage Museum at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs opened earlier this year with about a dozen cars and motorcycles.

Interestingly, one of those cars has the appearance of a refugee from the National Corvette Museum’s sinkhole; the Mitsubishi Evo VIII that Jeremy Foley crashed on the hillclimb in 2012 (and walked away from) is on display in its unrepaired state and situated hanging from a simulated cliff face. The hillclimb racers join about 31 carriages that were already in the museum.

Snow said that he anticipates more cars that raced in the early years of the hillclimb will join the museum for its upcoming centennial celebration in 2016.

The museum, which is open Mondays through Saturdays year-round, is also free to the public. For more information, visit PPIHC.com.

from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/1sTRxuq






Sourced by CA DMV registration services online. Renew your registration online in only ten minutes. No DMV, no lines, no hassles, and no appointments needed. Visit Quik, Click, pay, and print your registration from home.

SHARE

About Unknown