Running up that hill

One of the great things about motorsport are the opportunities for constant improvement, trying different things or just practising over and over to get the most out or yourself or your car. In circuit racing this might mean getting in a few practice days to try some setup changes or entering a whole series across the year to get in more laps. Part of the challenge is the constant drive to improve lest the competition moves ahead of you. Even when you are just competing against yourself and the clock for a bit of fun you will still often here the "PB" stories when someone sets their new best time or laments not quite getting there (and the requisite excuses…)

For rally this is a bit different as in most cases you can't practice a stage at all and you're lucky to do one pass on a stage year on year so you don't get the same chances to go over the road again, reliance on your pace notes and improving them however is the real challenge here.

But there is another form of competition that lies somewhere between these two disciplines and that's Hillclimb racing, especially on closed public roads. In these cases you might only get one event a year and just a handful of passes to get it right. And then some sadistic event co-ordinator elects to run the timing as "cumulative" so the results are based on the sum total of all the passes not just the fastest. Dastardly.

Old Willunga Hill in the southern vales wine region of South Australia is a famous short stretch of tarmac that winds its way up the hill face in the southern Mt Lofty ranges and is well known as a hillclimb stage for the Tour Down Under as well as a rally stage for both the Classic Adelaide and Adelaide Rally events. But now the Southern Districts Car Club also runs a once a year hillclimb event on the hill to open the road stage up to cars and drivers that might not otherwise be able to compete in a full rally.

So once a year in December a wide and varied field of cars assemble in the sleepy township and take over the main street to get their chance at the 3 km long ribbon of tarmac.

As a racetrack the hill has a bit of everything, fast and flowing at the start, some high speed loaded corners and esses finishing with tight and demanding corners at the top with the whole thing sandwiched between the Armco on one side and trees and embankment on the other. It's not to be taken lightly and every year there has been some damage. Of this I am acutely aware having crashed just 12 months ago on this very stage in the Adelaide Rally. It still hurts.

So the challenge is real. For those looking seriously at the final results it means getting stuck in right from the first run, you can't afford to ease in slowly or your average for the day will fall. Likewise you can't afford a mistake as one spin (or even a missed gear or two) will also drop your average. And given this is just a once a year event no one has any real advantage unless they happen to live locally….

I've done this event a few times in the past and also a few times as part of the various Tarmac Rally event over the years, in recent times this has fallen to the Datsun 240z but back in the early days of Classic Adelaide we used to compete in our little Elfin Clubman so when the calendar dropped this year I decided to take the Elfin back to the hill.

Unfortunately the times and results from back then are lost to history but thankfully some old on-board video footage from those events still lurks on a tape in the cupboard and a judicial use of the pause button and a stopwatch suggests that a time of about 1min 40sec was achieved in 2005 in rally trim.

Target acquired.

The Elfin has had a tough couple of years starting with an engine failure (and a spare engine failure) resulting in not only a rebuild but also a change of direction. With the non-crossflow build looking to be expensive with custom pistons it seemed a smarter choice to swap to the crossflow configuration as this only required new inlet, exhaust and another big hole in the bonnet. Bonus points – the crossflow setup has found about 20 more horsepower than the old setup and made the car measurably faster.

Give this I set an optimistic target of 1min 38 and hoped to do well in my class.

First run (practice) nets a 1min 37sec pass with more time in hand so already I'm a happy camper. Two more runs sees 1min 33.96 on the clock and while another two runs were made after lunch I didn't quite improve on the earlier time suggesting that's about my limit. Still, I'm extremely happy with this and also won the class, placed 17th 2WD and 37th outright from about 140 cars.

Sure, the Datsun is a good 3 seconds faster than this but for an old all iron pushrod 1600 that's a very respectable time and I had a lot of fun doing it.

And that's really the whole point of hillclimb and other club level events, it's about getting out and enjoying the car you have and perhaps tweaking and improving over time. You can take your daily driver or your full house racer and race your mates or just yourself and then share excuses afterwards over a drink.

So what's stopping you?