Pick a reason why organizers of the Falken Tires Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in Colorado leave the class-8 trucks to the end of the day, after the bikes, the old-style sprint cars, the stocks, the rally cars, and all the wonderfully quirky specials have roared up the 12.4-mile gravel course with its 156 turns, 2,000-foot cliffs, and 4,700-foot elevation gain.

It’s the noise. It’s the dust more than 1,000 horses under the hood can kick up. It’s the drama.

Take Mike Ryan’s performance at last summer’s Race to the Clouds.

“I pushed the truck on the last leg and hooked my tire just before the finish line,” Ryan recalls. “The truck flew sideways across the line.” In fact, he rolled the Freightliner as he passed the timing light at the finish line. Ryan’s No. 77 came to rest on its side in front of hundreds of wildly cheering fans at the summit, 14,110 feet in thin air. Unhurt, Ryan didn’t realize he’d crossed the line, so he clambered out of the truck, taking the steering wheel with him, and then jumped the eight feet down to the ground. He intended to cross the line on foot, thinking that his run would count if he took the wheel with him. But having mangled his feet in a plane crash several years ago, Ryan doesn’t jump too well. He fell, dropped the wheel, and had to wrestle it back from an over-exuberant fan wanting a souvenir.

“I hobbled across what I thought was the finish line,” he says, “until I heard people yelling at me that I’d already done it.”

As it happened, and much to his surprise, Ryan had broken his own record in the single-axle truck class and won the big-rig prize. He broke his previous record of 13 minutes, 39.2 seconds by nearly 18 seconds. His top speed as measured by timing lights was 96 miles an hour.

It takes a special kind of truck to make fast work of the trek up Pike’s Peak. Last July there were three entered in the class-8 category — Ryan’s Freightliner, a Sterling driven by Molly Morter and owned by Ryan’s racing team, and a Kenworth T2000 driven by Bruce Canepa.

Ryan’s much-modified Century Class is a racing machine pure and simple. It features a race version of the Mercedes-Benz 501 V6 twin-turbo engine which produces up to 1,450 horsepower. It’s the same engine used in the European Super Truck Tracing series. The truck rides on Michelin X-One tires, Accuride wheels, and an ArvinMeritor rear axle, a package that weighs only 7,800 pounds. It was built at the Freightliner Engineering and Test Center in Portland, Ore.

The No. 33 Sterling is a 2000 AT9500 model powered by a 14-litre race-version of the Detroit Diesel Series 60. The powertrain puts out 1,000 hp and 2,500 foot-pounds of torque, with gearing for a top speed of 102 mph. The truck sports ArvinMeritor hydraulic disc brakes all around, with Tenneco coil-over shocks and Freightliner’s FAS II air suspension. The rear axle is an ArvinMeritor RS-17-145.

Like Ryan’s rig, Morter’s Sterling was designed and built in Portland. It first raced at Pikes peak two years ago, when New Zealander Steve Chapman took it to third place behind Ryan and Canepa, but missed last year’s event. Ryan added it to his team this past spring and then hired 26-year-old Morter to drive it. She finished with a time just shy of 16 minutes, almost two minutes behind Canepa. Given that her previous racing experience was from behind the wheel of a dune buggy, she was overjoyed just to reach the top.

Canepa’s truck, prepared by an enthusiastic group of 12 volunteer Kenworth engineers led by the company’s assistant chief engineer Mike Gilbert, didn’t have a banner day. Veteran racer Canepa says his truck lost a lot of power a third of the way up the hill after appearing to overheat. He soldiered on regardless and was still quick enough to beat last year’s record time in the tandem class.

“It was good to get the record, but I think all of us on the Kenworth racing team were a disappointed that we didn’t run even faster based on our qualifying record and practice runs,” says Canepa, who finished third in the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1979 with teammates Rick Mears and Monte Shelton.

When the big KW came back down the hill, Gilbert searched for a cooling-system problem but found nothing. In the end, he blames the searing hot weather, believing the electronics had chopped power by as much as 30 per cent to prevent damage from overheating. The T2000, sponsored partly by Joplin. Mo.-based Contract Freighters Inc. (CFI), is powered by a Cat C16 that pumps out about 1,375 hp at 2,600 rpm and 4,000 foot-pounds of torque at the starting-line elevation. By the time the vehicle reaches the summit, the thin air drops output to 1,290 hp.

Other key equipment includes a ZF 5HP500 Ecomat transmission modified by ZF to racing specs. A de-cambered Dana I-beam axle is on the steer axle, and a Dana DS344 tandem-drive axle — mounted on a modified Kenworth Airglide 200 suspension — is out back. The truck sports custom-made Gabriel racing shocks, Bosch hydraulic disc brakes, and Bridgestone M711 low-profile 255/70R22.5 drive tires with a hand-cut tread pattern.

Besides setting out to win, Canepa and Gilbert say they use the Pike’s Peak climb to evaluate items that may eventually become available on production trucks. It makes the races worth watching: you never know — there may be a little bit of race truck in your rig.