Jeff Zwart's Pikes Peak Diary – An eclectic qualifying

The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is the second-oldest motorsports event in America. First contested in 1916, this weekend marks the 93rd running of the "Race to the Clouds."

Accomplished Porsche racer, photographer, commercial director and RACER co-founder Jeff Zwart is a seven-time class winner in this unique race, run on a 12.42-mile course with 156 turns that begins at 9,390ft and finishes at the 14,115ft summit of "America's Mountain." He returns there this year with a Porsche GT3 Turbo Cup to run in the Time Attack 1 class. -Ed.

After a couple of days of early morning practice on Pikes Peak, it was time to qualify. Pikes Peak's racecourse is divided into three parts for testing and practice. When it comes to qualifying, it is just run in the bottom section. Today is our day and after a solid team performance, we were ready.

The road had dried out and the course on the first run showed me that it was probably one of the best conditions I had seen this year. The Turbo Cup was solid and we were ready to make our runs and to see where we would start on Sunday.

• Jeff Zwart's practice diary: Winter is coming

The way qualifying works is that while we practice with our class all week, the qualifying time sets the run order based on time overall. So technically the race day order runs from fast to slow, no matter what class you are in.

There had been a bit of carnage in my Time Attack 1 class and we lost a purported 1000hp Nissan GTR. The car was able to be fixed, but it was running a in a wounded condition. The Time Attack 1 class was huge this year with 23 cars entered, so there was still no shortage of competition.

Our GT3 Turbo Cup had been running well, so that was the day to see what we could do. I currently hold the record in the class, so naturally we wanted to improve on that.

Rhys Millen, running an electric car (LEFT) had set the pace for the entire field all week and it looked as if he was on point to get the fast time of the day. We also had run well in the Time Attack 1 class and so had David Donner in another Porsche in the Time Attack 2 class. I was hoping it would be a good day for Porsche.

My first run nearly matched my previous record pace, so it was feeling good knowing we would have a couple more attempts before the morning would close things out. As the sun hit the road it became a flurry of activity and everyone upped their game.

Ultimately we were able to go 4 seconds under my previous record. David Donner had battled all week with Randy Pobst driving a Nissan GTR trading seconds on each section. Ultimately David came out with the fast time in Time Attack 2

Up front in the faster classes, I could see that there was a mixed bag of results. One of the favorites in the Electric class was Tajima who came up short on his expected time so Millen comfortably came away with the fastest time overall. In Open Wheel, Paul Dallenbach had dominated and he easily won fastest qualifier for his class. He had even gone faster on his second run, but a rule decision ended up affecting nearly all of the competitors in his group by not counting their last run.

It was nice to have qualifying over and our car was still in great shape. The majority of the snow had melted and the days had warmed up. We finally got a chance to see the results overall and to my surprise we had actually ended up second overall behind Rhys Millen. Right behind me is Paul Dallenbach who had been faster and Tajima rounded out the top 4.

Interestingly, this made a rather eclectic top three... an electric car, a production-based Porsche, and a full-blown winged open-wheeler. We now have a day off to prep and set up our pits up on the mountain so I am looking forward to not getting up at 2 a.m. and just mentally preparing for the big race day.