The City of Colorado Springs, which maintains the Pikes Peak Highway as a toll road, began paving the route in 2002 following the outcome of a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club. The environmental organisation sued over erosion damage caused by approximately 1.5 million tons of road gravel deposited over several decades, which was washing downstream into streams, reservoirs, vegetation, and wetlands. The court order required the city to pave the highway, and the local authority proceeded by surfacing approximately ten percent of the route each year from 2002 onward.
During the decade of progressive paving, the annual hill climb operated on an evolving mixture of gravel and asphalt sections. The event's champion of this transitional era was Japanese driver Nobuhiro Tajima, competing with Suzuki-backed machinery, who won the overall title six times between 2006 and 2011 and set two course records. His 2011 record of 9:51.278 was the first to break the ten-minute barrier, achieved partly on sections of remaining gravel.
The 2011 event was the final running to include any dirt sections, which by that point constituted approximately twenty-five percent of the course. The final stretch of paving was completed on October 1, 2011.
Rod Millen, a previous Pikes Peak champion, had warned publicly that paving the road would end the race. The prediction proved incorrect: by December 2011, the 2012 event had drawn over 170 racer registrations, compared with just 46 at the same point the previous year.
The 90th running of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in 2012 was the first conducted entirely on asphalt from start to finish, and it produced a larger field and a longer race day than any previous edition. Multiple records fell during the event, with the overall course record broken several times before finally settling with Rhys Millen — son of Rod Millen — in the Time Attack Division.
The change in surface had an immediate and dramatic effect on competing machinery. Mike Ryan demonstrated the altered dynamic when his big-rig truck spun in the hairpin section known as the "W's," struck a guard rail, executed a three-point turn, and continued — ultimately breaking his own truck record by five seconds. The incident illustrated both the higher cornering speeds enabled by tarmac and the changed demands on drivers.
The 2012 event also produced the first motorcycle sub-ten-minute time: Carlin Dunne riding a Ducati recorded 9:52.819, just 1.5 seconds slower than the previous year's overall course record, underscoring how dramatically the paved surface rewrote the performance benchmarks across all classes.
The switch to an entirely paved surface accelerated the pace of record-breaking. In 2013, World Rally Championship legend Sebastien Loeb, driving a purpose-built Peugeot 208 T16 Pikes Peak, shattered the nine-minute barrier with a time of 8:13.878 — more than 15 seconds faster than Rhys Millen's newly set mark from the year before, and almost 1 minute and 40 seconds faster than the pre-paving records set on mixed surfaces.
The progression continued with the rise of electric vehicles, culminating in the 2018 record of 7:57.148 set by Romain Dumas in the all-electric Volkswagen I.D. R — the first time any competitor had broken the eight-minute barrier on the 12.42-mile course climbing 4,720 feet to the 14,115-foot summit.
The paving of the Pikes Peak Highway reshaped the event's identity. The traditional challenge of reading and managing loose gravel surfaces — which had defined Pikes Peak for almost a century and favoured rally-type all-wheel-drive machinery — gave way to a pure downforce and mechanical-grip equation on smooth asphalt. The transition attracted a new wave of purpose-built unlimited class machinery optimised for paved hillclimbing and opened the event to the electric powertrain revolution, which would produce the fastest times in the race's history. Critics who feared the paving would reduce the event's drama were answered by a sustained run of record-breaking that continued for years after the 2012 transition.