Tighten your your belts and grab a piece of roll cage. We’re going for one of the wildest rides in motorsports: Climb Dance, Jean Louis Mouray’s short film featuring Ari Vatanen and Peugeot at the 1988 Pikes Peak Hill Climb. Watch!
Already famous in the motorsports world, this four-minute video doesn’t require much setup. Climb Dance, the award-winning 1989 short film created by Jean Louis Mourey for French automaker Peugeot, features Finnish rally wizard Ari Vatanen wrestling the fiendish all-wheel steering, all-wheel drive Peugeot 405 Turbo 16 at the 1988 Pikes Peak International Hillclimb.
Vatanan, a four-time winner of the Paris Dakar Rally and 1981 World Rally Champion, smashed the course record that year with a time of 10.47.77. With 600-plus horsepower and a blank-check development budget, the Peugeot 405 Turbo 16 was a machine of astonishing capabilities, as you will see for yourself in the in-car segments. In 2013, Peugeot had Climb Dance remastered in HD video. Hang on and watch this.
Quite impressive and scary as well. I have a major problem driving over a cliff and plummeting thousands of feet to the bottom; just one of my phobias. Last Sept. my wife and I were down in Aztec, NM, visiting the kids. We normally drive up north to Durango then west to Cortez and Monticello, and work our way northwest to hook up with I-15 that takes us home. Well, we decided to head up through Silverton. That is an experience I’ll never forget. We did the Silverton-Ouray road after dark. It was drizzling and there was road construction. I’m sure that my fingerprints will be forever etched on the wheel of our Avalanche (that’s one helluva name to call a truck you drive in the mountains). Over an hour of creeping through the switchbacks and I was eternally glad to see the road straighten out and the lights of Ouray come into view.
Watching that is actually disapointing. Quite untidy and overdriven,,, that being Vatanaen!
Lots of wheelspin and clouting the insides of corners.
I suspect lots of both road racers and dirt track racers would agree!
In what year did you win your World Rally Championship?
I have not,, but won regularly on both dirt and bitumen. And never trashed a car either unlike Vatenan. Who trashed lots of them!
With all due respect, that turbo seemed like a handful.
Holy crap! that looks fun!….scary at times to boot…and driver skillset and balls certainly does come into play. I drove in NASCAR and did our road courses at Dears Point and Riverside and Willow Springs and Laguna Seca but their nothing like this!