Rob Dahm Took His Three-Rotor RX-7 Up Pikes Peak — Not the Car You'd Expect

Car YouTube has spent years associating Rob Dahm with one specific machine: a quad-rotor, all-wheel-drive RX-7 that's been under construction, in one form or another, for the better part of a decade. That car wasn't the one he brought to Colorado this June. For the 104th running of the Broadmoor Pikes Peak International Hill Climb on June 21, Dahm entered a different, purpose-built RX-7 — a three-rotor hillclimber, running as car #146 in the Pikes Peak Open division — and drove it to the summit.

According to the event's official results, Dahm finished 13th in the Pikes Peak Open class and 50th overall out of the full field, posting a time of 11:40.456 on the 12.42-mile, 156-turn course up to the 14,115-foot summit — the same course, on the same day, that Ford factory driver Romain Dumas won outright in a 1,400-horsepower electric Super Mustang Mach-E. Dahm's RX-7 wasn't fighting for the overall win; Pikes Peak Open is the event's catch-all class for cars that don't fit the purpose-built Unlimited or production-based classes, and a rotary-powered '93 RX-7 running mid-pack against everything from a 2015 Porsche GT3 Cup car to a 1967 Dodge Coronet is a fair summary of what that division looks like.

The car itself is a different build from the AWD quad-rotor project Dahm has spent years developing for the street and time attack. Its sequential gearbox — a Tremec T56 Magnum fitted with a straight-cut sequential conversion — was built through a collaboration between Tremec, Pfitzner Performance Gearboxes, and Tick Performance, according to Tick Performance's own account of the project. PPG's sequential systems are designed to work with closed-loop shift strategies capable of sub-70-millisecond gear changes, a spec aimed squarely at the kind of rapid, back-to-back shifting a hillclimb's blind corners and elevation changes demand.

Pikes Peak has become something of a proving ground for car-culture YouTubers looking to trade builds and dyno numbers for an actual, official, sanctioned result — Dahm's entry sits alongside a growing list of content creators who've taken project cars up the mountain rather than just filming them. Whatever the class placement, a 13th-in-division finish in a self-built three-rotor RX-7, on a mountain that regularly ends other entrants' runs early — three cars in the Pikes Peak Open field alone didn't finish this year — is a real, sanctioned result his YouTube dyno pulls and static builds don't produce on their own.