Owner of Highlands and Hampton Downs motorsport venues, Tony Quinn is contesting the Pikes Peak event for a third time. Driving the Pace Innovations developed Ford Focus (with a Nissan RB35 powerplant) he has been taking every opportunity to run the car at pace.
“It is just a personal thing really – to do Pikes Peak and tick it off my list. This is my third year – it might be my last.
“I love coming to America; if I was a young fella I’d be here in America.
“We did the practice here two weeks ago, then we did the Donegal Rally (Ireland) last week and now we are back to Pikes Peak – so it’s a bit of a journey, it’s what I do, it’s what I’m good at – getting out of the way!
“The car is good. I don’t know what it is, it’s a bit dodgy and skittery for the first couple of minutes – whether the suspension needs to heat up – we don’t know. Everyone that drives it says the same and then it gets better. So the first bit is a bit daunting to be honest – the car tends to dart across the road. It’s a very aggressive car – stupidly aggressive; I only run half-boost – seriously. Hayden Paddon would have to run it to get the best out of it, and it would even scare him.
“It is a personal thing; I’m not competing against anybody. I started off wanting to do it three years ago. I’ve done it, I liked it, came back and last year wasn’t a good year when we ran out of brakes. This year we think we’ve got the car where we wanted it to be.
“The big pressure for me is there is 24 members from Highlands coming over and they’ll all be here on Sunday. It’s not motivation it’s bloody pressure – they’ll all be coming to see something, so I had better make it happen.
“The experienced guys will tell you it takes eight times to get on top of this event. If you look at Sebastien Loeb and Romain Dumas, they come here for a month at a time – going up and down the mountain, memorising every corner, doing theoretical times. In fact, Loeb set a time two seconds faster than that of the theoretical run.
“I’ve got a $10 bet the electrical VW will peel a couple seconds off that time. When they were doing the practice runs they were probably five seconds quicker.”
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