With Pikes Peak International Hill Climb around the corner,we felt it was a good time to show Kern’s Pikes Peak EVO IX featured earlier this year on MotoIq. Kern’s EVO uses 18×10.5 RPF1 Racing Series wheels.
The Kerns are no ordinary team and this is no ordinary Evo. It all started innocently enough with David dodging cones in a parking lot. He then started getting sideways in dirt at rally-x events. The joys of playing in the dirt were too strong to resist and he started to get serious about racing. Perhaps the biggest coup was convincing his wife to go play in the dirt too. Follow along to see what it takes to be successful at Pikes Peak.
Here is the story as David Kern tells it:
“I got my start racing back in 2001 sliding around on a frozen lake near Woodland Park, Colorado. After a couple years of doing auto-x and rally-x events I got the itch to go faster and had decided I liked sliding sideways. In late 2004 I got a roll cage installed in a 1988 Mazda 323GTX and convinced my wife to ride shotgun as my navvie. We raced with the Colorado Hill Climb Association (CHCA), a group that puts on 4-6 all dirt hillclimb events in Colorado every summer. Despite running an underpowered 17 year old car, we had a blast and posted up some decent times. Somewhere about the 3rd or 4th race Allison asked me what it would take to start running with the fast guys and my reply was “Evo.” It would take a few years to find the right candidate, a theft recovery salvage title car.