An electric advantage?

His team’s 911 Turbo S mixes all-wheel drive with rear-wheel steering to add some extra agility, but the electric front axle on the Corvette gives it a particular advantage in a few areas, including traction control.

“It makes it all easier to function with the hybrid, especially taking away power,” said Matt Foley, crew chief on the 000. Traditional traction control either cuts power to the engine, slowing all four wheels, or applies the brakes to the spinning wheels, which wears them out more quickly. “With the hybrid, you can literally just pull power out of the front,” he said.

But in the Corvette, its primary purpose is to provide instant, quick response in every corner, from the bottom to the top, something that particularly impressed Hildebrand in the extremely low-speed hairpins.

“Whatever car you’re in, no matter how much horsepower it has, you’re always waiting for it to get up in the power band and start building momentum off the corners,” Hildebrand told me. “This thing is just like ‘POP!’ It just pulls the car up into the second-gear RPM band, and it’s off to the races.”

Add to that the ability to efficiently vector torque across the front axle under both acceleration and deceleration, and you have a car that mixes some of the extra control and finesse offered by electrification with the brute power of internal combustion.

It ultimately proved a winning combination, as Hildebrand’s ZR1X beat Jeff Zwart’s 911 GT2 RS by 14 seconds and came in 23 seconds sooner than Donner’s Turbo S, which climbed the mountain in 9:53.740. That’s just two-tenths off of his 2022 record time, a remarkable exhibition of consistency.

Whether it is the outright production record, though, is something of a topic of debate. Chevrolet is clearly treating this as a new outright record for a production car on the mountain. Pikes Peak regulations for production cars, however, seems to exclude hybrids, making the ZR1X the fastest production hybrid.

Regardless, it was an EV that came out on top again. Romain Dumas did indeed put down the fastest time of the day at 8:18.202. He fell short of his own 2018 record by 21 seconds but took the overall win by 11 seconds over the Sendycar V1, which set a new record as the fastest rear-drive car ever.

Hybrid, electric, and good ol’ internal combustion all had something to cheer about this past Sunday, but as usual, the real goal is selling on Monday.