If you are sitting at the starting line for your chance to tear up Pikes Peak, have no doubt in your mind that you are either exceptionally talented or exceptionally brave. Or both. Without question, every year the pack of racers will be a group of “best of the best” drivers who will attack the mountain course with all that they can muster out of themselves and the machines they have sank hope, hours and tons of emotions and money into. No matter that the entire highway is paved…that means precious little when you can look off the edge and see a drop that will require you to take a breath in-between screams before you hit the bottom. But that doesn’t deter drivers…if anything, it entices them as a challenge.

Two names that are strongly tied to Pikes Peak are Rod Millen and Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima. Millen has held the fastest time on the mountain five times and had ran the course before partial paving projects removed some of the dirt sections of the course. His goal was to break the ten-minute mark, but he never made that. Still, watching him fling around monsters like this radical 850 horsepower Toyota Celica sillouhette racer on the dirt was something to behold. The Celica had an underfloor diffuser that sucked the Celica to the ground, causing the car to blow up rooster tails of dust wherever it went.

Tajima ended up breaking Millen’s speed record, one that stood for thirteen years, in 2007. He broke the ten-minute time in 2011. “Monster”, his nickname, has run cars with dual engines, heavily turbocharged mills, and electric race cars. This was a man who built his own car, that might have used a grille from a Suzuki Escudo (Sidekick) and pretty much nothing else, and was powered by two 1.6L four-bangers that together made a snorting, pissed off 900 horsepower. Tajima did not screw around with his designs.

From start to finish, these two titans went after each other, the mountain and the clock, trying to hit that seemingly mythical sub-10 minute time. Hit play below and check it out!