[VIDEO] Krider Racing’s Corvette Z06Life Takes on California’s Hoopa Hillclimb

Photo Credit: Austin Fowler

We featured the exploits of Krider Racing and their Corvette ‘Z06Life’ earlier this year when it competed and won the opening round of the 2015 Optima Batteries Ultimate Street Car Invitational.

The team has been involved in a number of racing events this year from hitting 180 mph at the Mojave Mile to a podium finish at the 25 Hours of ThunderHill, and now you can add Northern California’s Hoopa Hillclimb to the list.

Team owner and driver Rob Krider told the Napa Valley Register that doing a hill climb has been on his bucket list for a while.

“I’ve wanted to do a hill climb for a long time,” said Krider. “It is one of the earliest forms of motorsports, and it seemed like an event where our team’s skill set could do well. Colorado has the infamous Pike’s Peak, but in California we have the Hoopa Hillclimb up near the Oregon border. I just felt like we needed to do it.”

The Hoopa Hillclimb is a dramatic 2.2 miles long sprint with a 1,160 foot climb in elevation with 12 turns and switchbacks. On one side of the road is the mountain and on the other side is a cliff. If that’s not enough to make any Corvette driver sweat, you also have to dodge trees, rocks and telephone poles along the side of the road while the tree cover often shades the road making the course dark in many areas.

“I was prepared for the idea of racing on a closed street course as opposed to a real race track because we did that with the Silver State Classic in Nevada,” Krider said. “But the Silver State was all out on 100 miles of flat, straight road. The Hoopa Hill Climb was anything but flat or straight, and there were lots of hard things to hit like telephone poles, rocks, or trees. And if you are unlucky enough to miss the hard stuff, then you will just fall down one of the cliffs until you do run into something that will stop you.”

At the quickest section of the course, Krider’s Z06 set the fastest trap speed at 100 mph. While traversing the 12th and final turn, the Z06 was going 80 mph when the backend went wide but Krider maintained control and crossed the finish line at a time of 2:19:04 which is considered a very wild ride.

While we haven’t seen the results of the 2015 Hoopa Hillclimb, Krider, who also writes a column for Speed:Sport:Life under the moniker ‘Racer Boy’ says the time was good enough to set the Auto Journo record.

Watch the video below and you’ll see what a wild ride a hillclimb can be:

Source:
NapaValleyRegister.com and SpeedSportLife.com

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