COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — You’d be forgiven if before Sunday you’d never heard of Robin Shute.

The 31-year-old native of England was effectively a no-name with very little on his racing résumé. Now Shute, who works as an automotive engineer for Faraday Future, is a Pikes Peak Int’l Hill Climb winner.

“It’s nice to add your name to some kind of history in motorsport,” said Shute, who moved to the United States eight years ago and resides in California. “To go and achieve that at the end of it, I think that is really, really cool.”

Shute joins a stunning list of competitors to win one of America’s longest running motorsports events. Among those to collect overall victories at Pikes Peak are Bobby Unser, Al Unser, Al Unser Jr., Rick Mears, Mario Andretti, Nobuhiro Tajima, Rhys Millen, Sebastien Loeb and Romain Dumas.

The chance for Shute to compete in the Pikes Peak Int’l Hill Climb was the culmination of a lifelong dream for the Englishman, who said a video game from his youth inspired him to pursue an opportunity to travel to Colorado to compete in the legendary event.

“It was something I grew up with as a kid. If you’re familiar with Gran Turismo 2, if you remember that game they had like a Suzuki car and they had a Pikes Peak track,” Shute recalled. “Obviously as a kid I loved rallying as well. The Group D cars and all that. It is pretty legendary and I was well aware of it, from single digits anyway.”

Three years ago, Shute got the opportunity to live his dream thanks to his job at Faraday Future. He made his debut in the event affectionately known as The Race to the Clouds in 2017, driving a 2016 Faraday Future FF91 to a time of 11:25.082, which placed him 40th overall.

“It wasn’t going to be competitive for the overall victory, but it was still a great way to get my feet wet,” Shute recalled. “I just wanted to go as fast as I could up the hill.”

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