Codie Vahsholtz has never been afraid to embrace change.

The longtime racer out of Woodland Park zoomed up America’s Mountain on Sunday in the 104th Broadmoor Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in his usual 2013 Ford Open Vahsholtz custom.

The results of the race were not available until after this edition of the Pikes Peak Courier had gone to the printer. We will follow up on the race in the July 1 issue.

The difference this year for Vahsholtz is did his zooming with a new twin-turbo engine.

“Motor, gasoline-powered engines they just naturally lose a lot of power,” he said. “It’s like 30% of the power that they’re capable of making is no longer usable just due to lack of air. So I ended up putting a twin turbo-charged setup on it.”

It’s not the first time the third-generation racer has had to adapt to a changing landscape. Since entering the PPIHC in 2011, Vahsholtz had already captured multiple wins in the PPIHC motorcycle competition when race officials announced that the motorcycle competition would be discontinued in 2021 following the death of his Ducati teammate Carlin Dunne in 2019.

“Just growing up watching my grandparents and my parents race this event and others, it’s something that I’ve always dreamed of doing and so the easiest way I could do it and afford it was to race motorcycles,” Vahsholtz said. “Throughout the process, I got some very good sponsors that helped make it all possible and then whenever obviously the casualty of one of my best buds, my teammate, went down, I just thought that my Pikes Peak career was going to be done and I didn’t know that I was going to be able to come back and do it.”

Two things intervened. The knowledge that Dunne would want Vahsholtz to continue racing and that racing is in his blood. Vahsholtz’s father, Clint, and grandparents, Barb and Leonard, have been inducted into the PPIHC Hall of Fame.

In 2020, dad claimed the King of the Mountain title, winning the Open Wheel division in the 2013 Ford with a time of 9:35.490, the best time of the day. After that year, he passed the car to Codie Vahsholtz, who found a new way to challenge the mountain on four wheels instead of two.

“The biggest thing that was hard for me is not being able to use my body as a weight bias,” Vahsholtz said. “Now I’m obviously belted in and figure out how to drive it and maneuver and make the car do things that I would just normally fix with my body. That was probably the hardest thing.”

Vahsholtz’s grandfather helped him fund a team, and ever since, the former motorcycle racer has been tearing up the track on Pikes Peak. He notched a pair of wins in 2022 and 2023, beating Clint’s 2020 record in the latter with a time of 9:19.192.

Last year, he took second in the division and sixth overall on a shortened course with a time of 4:02.175.

This year, he’s hoping that the new engine will help him return to the top of the podium, even if not everyone is fond of the change.

“Technology has taken over a lot of that. Modern-day fuel injection is really, really good, turbo technology is really, really good,” he said. “Now we have very, very, very powerful electronic motors that are running these vehicles. …. There are people that are totally for everything and then there’s also other people that are totally against it. My grandfather is a great example. Anything electronic is another failure point and this and that and I do agree with him to a point. But there’s a point in time whenever you’re trying to get to the limit of whatever you’re in or on, sometimes you have to have assist to be able to compete because everybody else is staying at the tippy-top level.”