Page 64 - The Book For Men Spring/Summer 2024

AIRPLANES GENERALLY CRUISE AT AROUND 10,000 METRES nothing else.”
above sea level. The summit of Mount Everest, the tallest point on Earth, sits at 8,849 metres. Mont Blanc’s peak is 4,809 metres. Toronto’s CN Tower? A paltry 553 metres.
So use these as reference points when we tell you the story of racing driver Romain Dumas and his small support team who had the bright idea to drive to an elevation of 6,734 metres above sea level, travelling to the pinnacle of the Ojos del Salado volcano in Chile. That’s high. And, as if the altitude wasn’t enough, they wanted to do it in a Porsche 911.
The previous altitude record was set in 2020 by a Mercedes Unimog, a gigantic off-road truck. Unimogs, however, are workhorses by trade. The Porsche 911 is a thoroughbred, and one with no business at the top of a volcano. Of course, a little craziness is necessary for any great
expedition to succeed but this seemed more than a little crazy.
“For sure, the most scary time was above 6,500 metres,” Dumas tells The Book For Men on a video call from his home in Geneva. “I’m not unhealthy, you know. I do a lot of sports. But you have to be fit to go higher, especially if something goes wrong.” The air is half as dense as the human body is accustomed to at the top of Ojos del Salado, and temperatures there
can drop way below freezing.
“So that was my biggest fear,” Dumas says, “bending the car or breaking
my arm or something. I had a bottle of oxygen in the car in case of emer- gencies, and a small [first-aid] kit in case of little minor injuries, but
Dumas, for context, is not a person who is easily scared. He’s 48 years old, and has been racing for 32 of them. In his long and illustrious career as a professional driver, the Frenchman has won 24-hour races at the Nürburgring, Spa-Francorchamps, and Le Mans. He also holds the current record for the fearsome Pikes Peak hill climb — which tops out at 4,302 metres — which he set in an electric Volkswagen. In 2019, during a practice session for the Goodwood Festival of Speed hill climb in Britain, Dumas smashed the course record that had held for 20 years. The following day, only a damp track prevented him from making the record official.
Yet, with the Ojos del Salado expedition, Dumas was the leader of a whole team, of guides, engineers, and professional climbers. “It was really a team effort,” he explains. “We trained in Europe to see who would be able to handle the high altitude. We went to Chamonix and did lots of fitness tests in simulated high-altitude. The engineers from Porsche understood that they needed to train, that you could die at any time, that this was no joke.”
The pair of specially modified Porsche 911 Carrera 4S models used during the expedition were built in Dumas’s workshop. Their 3.0-litre, 443 horsepower flat-six engines were left unchanged; the electronic systems automatically adjust for thinner air. Both cars ran on e-fuel, a carbon-neu- tral combustion fuel Porsche has helped to develop.
Portal axles were fitted to increase the cars’ ground clearance (to 350 millimetres) and reduce the gear ratios. Aramid underbody armour protected the cars’ oily bits, and a steer-by-wire system called “Space Drive”
64 BFM / SS24 AUTO / GETTING HIGH