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Peak
Performance
Frank Peterson
drove this 1969 Oldsmobile Toronado to victory at the 1970 Pikes Peak
Hillclimb, and he owns the car still
By Steve Statham
Photography by
Steve Statham
Take a
metaphorical drillbit and bore a hole through the hard shell of work-a-day
drudgery and into the soft inner daydreams of the average gearhead, and you’ll
probably uncover a Pikes Peak Hillclimb fantasy. You know, the one where you’re
muscling a 500-horsepower beast around gravel-covered curves, up and up the
mountain, no guardrails, always at the limits of control, with a trophy waiting
at the top with your name on it.
For most
gearheads, to experience that even once in the real world would be the
butt-puckering thrill of a lifetime. Now imagine doing it annually for 31
years, and you have an insight into Frank Peterson’s life.
In one of his
best years on the mountain, Peterson, of Morrison, Colorado, drove the 1969
Oldsmobile Toronado shown here to first place in the Stock Car class at the
1970 Hillclimb, But that’s just one chapter in the life of a man who first
raced Colorado’s famous mountain in 1959, and every year thereafter through
1989. In fact, he’s been a regular at Pikes Peak long before and long after
those dates. “We went to high school together,” said Frank’s wife Kaye. “And
about our first or second date I went with him and his folks up to Pikes Peak,
and that was in 1955.”
“We’ve been to every Pikes Peak together
since 1955,” Frank said. “We’ve never missed a race.”
One of America’s
great original races, the first Pikes Peak Hillclimb was flagged in 1916.
Although the course and road surface have undergone the occasional update, the
basics of the “Race to the Clouds” remain unchanged. The course begins at
slightly over 9,000 feet, and the winding path up the mountain finishes at the
14,110-foot summit, an altitude that leaves both engines and humans gasping for
breath.
Pikes Peak is a
natural destination for Frank, who has deep family roots in Colorado, and deep
roots in the Colorado racing community. Frank’s paternal grandfather first
arrived in Colorado in 1891 to work in the gold and silver mines. The rest of
the clan shortly followed.
For Frank, the
itch to tinker with machinery began as a teenager, when his father bought him
an electric welder, acetylene torch and drill press so he could build and
repair equipment around the family farm. He later used those skills to open his
own shop in 1958, specializing in custom machine work, welding, and crafting
items such as roll bars for race cars.
He also started
racing, and in 1958 built his first sports car using a 1954 Jaguar chassis, a
Corvette engine and a Bocar fiberglass body. He raced at Lookout Mountain near
Golden, at SCCA races at Lowry Air Base in Denver, and at Continental Divide
Raceway near Castle Rock. Frank began his three-decade run at Pikes Peak in
1959, and that hand-built sports car finished second in class in 1962.
At his shop, he
also constructed cars for other competitors, including some very high profile
ones. In 1961 Frank helped John Bandimere build a 1961 409 Chevy Stock Car that
raced at Pikes Peak, and later helped with the build of a 1964 426 Hemi
Plymouth Belvedere, which Nick Sanborn drove to victory on the mountain in
1965, with Frank Peterson and Frank Sanborn as crew chiefs. Starting in 1969,
Peterson drove one of the 50 AMX SS drag cars, owned by Bandimere and labeled
as “The Frog,” at drag strips throughout the Mountain West.
It was in the
mid-1960s that Frank and Kaye began a long and fruitful partnership with
Oldsmobile. The Toronado looked like a natural for the mountain, with its
grippy front-wheel-drive layout and monster motor. “When Oldsmobile started the
Toronado in ’65 they were doing the pilot cars and everything for it, and they
got Bobby Unser to drive one at Pikes Peak in the fall of the year,” Frank
said. “They thought at that time maybe they could break the record, but it
didn’t turn out that way. Of course, Bobby was really busy at that time with
his Indy cars and everything, so he recommended that they have Frank and Nick
Sanborn and I take that over.”
For Frank, it was
a pipeline into the factory that boosted him into the top tier of competitors.
Frank built two Toronados for Pikes Peak in 1966, and Nick Sanborn won the
class that year in one of them. In 1967 Frank built a Toronado for himself to
drive, and finished second after running out of gas in the last mile. In 1968,
Frank had a hand in three Toronados, and they finished 1-2-3, with Nick Sanborn
first, Frank second, and Bob Fling third. And then there was our feature car, a
’69, that ran in the 1969, ’70 and ’71 Hillclimbs, including Frank’s win in
1970. “I think we had 10 different cars over that period of time,” he said.
“I had Oldsmobile sponsorship for 26
years. They used to help us a lot with engineering. Like this car [the ’69],
they built the motor and Hydra-Matic built the transmission for it,” he said.
“They built a final drive for this with 5.12:1 gearing. They had to make those
gears, which was quite a process. I think at the time they cost about $20,000
apiece to make those gears, because I think they only made five sets of them,
something like that.”
Of course, given
the times, it was a quiet kind of sponsorship. “That was at the time GM was
supposed to be completely out of racing, but this was kind of all done through
[Oldsmobile] Engineering,” Frank said. “We didn’t really get much money in
those days from them, but we’d get a lot of parts, we’d get the cars and a lot
of things like that. And then the good thing about having them as a sponsor,
all of the tire companies wanted to help, be involved — AC, all the other
divisions wanted to be in it. We ended up getting a lot of support that way.”
The 455ci V-8 in
the ’69 Toronado was built with the standard bore and stroke, but was bolstered
with titanium valves, Carrillo rods and Venolia pistons. Hooker custom-built a
set of headers for the car. Joe Mondello worked over the heads for the engine,
which delivered a pot-boiling 14.5:1 compression ratio. “Pikes Peak, you need
all the compression you can get because the air is so thin,” Frank said.
There were other
factory goodies. “Oldsmobile had some experimental aluminum drums,” he said.
“We used those in there with sintered metallic linings. That also has a giant
radiator. It’s really hard to cool cars at Pikes Peak because the air is so
thin.”
Franks says that
in that winning year, the Stock Car class was well-populated with
factory-favored entrants, and that he was running against 427ci Fords, 454
Chevys and 426 Hemi Plymouths. As Frank recalls it, his winning time was in the
14.56 range — “Which wasn’t a real good time for that particular year,” he
said. “On the way up, about five miles up the road — Pikes Peak is 12 ½ miles —
I hit a big rock and broke the shifter on the transmission and it was stuck in
second gear. So I couldn’t really go as fast on the straightaways as you would
have liked to. Then it was kind of sluggish coming off the turns, not being
able to use low gear. But Pikes Peak, being like it is, everybody else had as
much trouble, or more trouble, than I did, I guess.”
To take advantage
of the Toronado’s strengths required a change in driving style. “They were
really a neat car to drive,” Frank said. “It was quite a bit different than a
rear-wheel-drive car, because a rear-wheel drive car on dirt, normally if you
get in trouble, you can just let off, and the car will straighten out. But with
these, if you started getting in trouble you had to stand on it to keep the
front wheels spinning. If you ever let them start to slide, then you’re gonna
go off the road for sure. So it took a little while to change your way of
driving. When you get in trouble, you immediately want to let off the throttle,
and with these you have to just stand on it.”
After the
Toronado was retired in 1971, it sat in storage for decades. Frank, of course,
continued racing other Oldsmobiles. A 1971 4-4-2 followed the Toronado, after
which came a 1973 Old Omega, which Frank raced until 1977. The Omega died a
spectacular death that year at the Fall Teller Country Hillclimb at Cripple
Creek, when a busted tie rod sent the car flipping end-over-end at 120 mph,
right at the finish line. In 1978 Frank switched to the Cutlass bodystyle,
running several different cars well into the ’80s. His cars arrived at the Peak
show-ready, and he won several “Best-Appearing Car and Crew” awards. By this
time, Frank and Kaye’s two sons, Brett and Rob, were heavily involved in the
construction of the cars, as pretty much all the engine building, chassis
construction, paint and bodywork was done in-house.
The family’s
operation became even more ambitious in 1986, when Frank decided to build an
all-wheel-drive Olds for the Pro Rally Class. Oldsmobile was heavily involved
in the build of this car. Saginaw Division built the drive axles, drive shafts,
and some inboard-mounted brake parts. McLaren built an Indy-style GM V-6 for
the car, which was mounted in the rear, and Frank incorporated magnesium “quick
change” differential housings, as used on Indycars. The car used a Kevlar body
shell. That Olds was raced through the 1989 season, and was featured in several
national magazines, as well as being displayed at the General Motors proving
ground, and the SEMA show. Today the Petersons still own it, and it will sit
next to the Toronado in the new garage the couple is building.
And as for the
Toronado? It sat largely unmoved since the 1970s, until being given fresh paint
and stripes in 2009. Gary Riley and Marvin Galbraith from Level One Restoration
painted the car, with the lettering handled by Joe Broxterman of Speedway
Graphics in Denver. It was put on display at the 2009 Oldsmobile Nationals,
where it was the talk of the show.
Remarkably, Frank
says that after all that time, the engine started and ran with no drama, the
transmission worked fine, and the power steering operated as if no time had
passed. Hey, if a car can conquer the mountain, it can surely handle a few
decades of slumber.
Wall of fame: Frank Peterson and
wife Kaye were inducted into the Colorado Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2008.
Their two sons, Brett and Rob, also raced at Pikes Peak, starting in the late
1980s. In 1988, the family became the first to have a father and two sons race
at Pikes Peak at the same time, and the sons continued driving after Frank
retired from the driver’s seat. Frank calculates that the family and shop had a
total of 54 cars and trucks entered in the Pikes Peak Hillclimb from 1959 to 1996.
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