Three Hillclimbs
(30 December 2011)
Among the highlights of 2011 were the opportunities to visit - or in one case re-visit - three hillclimb courses. Throwing myself upon the mercy of the court, I acknowledge it to be a scandal and an outrage that I had not previously hauled my sorry ass either to Shelsley Walsh or to Loton Park, and it is entirely thanks to Vauxhall that I finally did so in October.
Why Vauxhall? Well, the UK media launch of the Astra GTC was scheduled for that time, and Vauxhall's PR department considered it a fine wheeze to let several dozen British motoring journalists hurl themselves up both Shelsley and Loton in the new car. Even more splendidly, this was run as an official event under Motor Sports Association regulations, with prizes and everything. A recipe for carnage, you may think, but no damage was done.
Shelsley Walsh absolutely reeks of history. The Midland Automobile Club, which runs the events there, was founded in a hotel room in January 1901, and I find it charming that the members organised another meeting in the same hotel room exactly a century later. The first Shelsley hillclimb took place in August 1905, making this easily, in the MAC's own phrase, the oldest operational motorsport venue in the world: Indianapolis is nearly six years younger, and neither the first Grand Prix nor the first Le Mans 24 Hour race had happened when Ernest Instone set fastest time at the inaugural event in his Daimler.
There are more complicated hillclimb courses, but few have the majesty of Shelsley, whose track climbs up the side of an imposing Worecestershire valley. It's incredibly steep, too. It doesn't look it in pictures or videos, but from inside the car there are sections where you think a stairlift might not be a bad idea. And, while many of the corners can be taken flat-out in an Astra GTC even in the wet, they all require careful thought, especially if you're at the wheel of one of the many-hundred bhp F1-style cars which contest the British Hillclimb Championship.
Not too long a drive from Shelsley, nine miles west of Shrewsbury, is Loton Park, which is much younger (more than half a century) and, unlike its predecessor, no longer uses exactly the same layout that it started with. But it's not to be missed, partly - and I suppose trivially - because it is so beautiful. Most British hillclimb courses are attractive, but Loton's parkland setting is simply delightful.
Not that you're conscious of that when you're trying to set a time. The challenge of Loton is very different from that of Shelsley. It is a great deal more technical, with never more than a couple of seconds of relaxation before you have to make your next decision about where to place the car. A small deviation from the ideal line can make the difference between a corner being relatively easy or a major problem, and by "small deviation" I mean something like a tyre's width on a piece of tarmac so narrow that it sometimes felt like there wasn't enough of it to contain the Astra.
There are two major braking points, and each offers scope for embarrassment. The first is at a popular spectator point, so you really don't want to get that one wrong (though I did). The second comes at the end of Loton's fastest section, and rather irritatingly there's a right-hander over a crest just where you don't want it to be. Hit the brakes too early here and you'll lose an enormous amount of time. Hit them too late and you might end up in Wales.
Competing - even at a humble level - at both venues on the same day was a great privilege, and I very much hope to do so again at each of them some time in the future.
Even if you'd already heard of Shelsley Walsh and Loton Park, you may not be aware of Eagle's Rock, the third hillclimb course I visited in 2011. This was back in April, on the occasion of Honda presenting the revised Jazz to the press. The chosen venue was Bushmills, in Northern Ireland, and one thing I had to do while I was in the area was drive on the Northwest 200 bike course, which consists of a triangle of public roads linking Coleraine, Portrush and Portstewart. In a car, at legal speeds, it's quite pleasant, but on a racing bike it must be absolutely terrifying, especially since the highest recorded speed is reputed to be 204mph.
But that's another story. On the other side of Coleraine from Bushmills, near the small town of Downhill (well-named if you're travelling east to west, not so much the other way), is the aforementioned Eagle's Rock, and I was drawn there because it's where I competed in my first Irish hillclimb.
This was at the suggestion of journalist and multiple Irish hillclimb champion Richard Young, who had suggested to my father that that if I went over he would look after me and steer me clear of what he termed "Apache country". Beyond the fact that I existed I don't think he knew anything about me, and in retrospect I doubt that he expected to meet a sullen teenager with no social skills whatever and an unhelpful habit of locking other people's front door keys in their houses, though I still contend that this was due to a simple misunderstanding.
Like all Irish hillclimbs, Eagle's Rock consists of a stretch of public road which is temporarily closed once a year for competition purposes, so there was no problem about driving up it in the Jazz. Even at a gentle potter there was no doubt that it was neither wider nor better-surfaced than it had been last time I visited, and I could see why it had seemed so intimidating when I attempted to drive up it in anger.
The key section consists of a crest, a sharp left-hander, a small bridge with solid parapets and then a climbing right-hander. Things could go very badly wrong here, which I imagine is why it's called Hell Hole. I attribute the fact that I won my class largely to the fact that on my final run I forgot where Hell Hole was and came screaming over the crest on full throttle. Looking over this section in 2011, I couldn't understand how I got out alive all those years before.
(The other reason for my modest success is that I took an earlier corner flat-out on the same run. I hadn't done so previously, but this time I noticed that a couple of friends who had come with me were spectating there, and I wanted to look impressive. I wasn't very scientific about my competition driving back then.)
Actually, I didn't just win the class. I also broke the record by 7.8 seconds, an achievement I have not come close to repeating since. Bearing in mind how inexperienced I was, and how slow the car was, I can only assume that the previous holder had walked up, possibly while carrying a heavy suitcase in each hand.
I'd like to leave it there, but I know Richard Young will object strongly if I avoid mentioning an incident that took place between us leaving his house (which he had had to break into to get his keys back) and arriving at Eagle's Rock. Although my car was road-legal, I had taken it to Ireland on what I now understand to have been a monumentally badly-loaded trailer.
Never having towed anything before, I had no reason to believe that the handling of the towcar was in any way odd. "So this is what towing is like - how interesting!" I had thought to myself as I merrily applied armfuls of corrective steering lock even when travelling in what was supposed to be a straight line.
The sober realisation that this was not how things were meant to be came on a stretch of dual-carriageway near Belfast. A helpless feeling that something terrible was going to happen had already engulfed me a hundred yards before it actually did. But things might have been worse. The tyre marks on the grass verge came within eighteen inches of a foot-thick wooden post carrying a "Welcome to Castlereagh" sign.
It was all a long time ago now, but Richard has still not stopped laughing about this.
