Abarth 500 Hillclimb
by David Finlay (2 July 2010)
Regular readers will know that the most enjoyable motoring-related weekend I had in 2009 involved competing with an Abarth Grande Punto at the formidable Doune hillclimb course in central Scotland (see feature). It was a great experience, but if there was one thing I slightly regretted at the time, it was the fact that I wasn't driving an Abarth 500 instead. The reason, I have to admit, was purely an aesthetic one. I mean, just look at the car. Wouldn't you like to compete in something as pretty as that?
Imagine my delight, then, when Abarth had the kindness - based, I suppose, on the fact that I wasn't too embarrassingly slow last year, and kept the Grande Punto away from the walls, trees and barriers which line most of the course - to ask me back to Doune for another event, this time (hurrah!) in a 500. As in 2009, there were two cars, each with two drivers, and in this case the team was intended to consist of myself, Alisdair Suttie (who was at Doune last year with the Grande Punto), Stephen Park (who wasn't) and fellow journalist and multiple Irish hillclimb champion Richard Young.
As things turned out, Richard had to call off just a few days before the event, and his place was taken by that thoroughly excellent fellow Howard Paterson, who looks after the cars on behalf of Abarth.
Even with the esseesse engine modifications, which boost power output considerably, the 500 is less powerful than the similarly-tweaked Grande Punto, but it's also a lot lighter, and as a result it's quicker in a straight line. There was some discussion about whether it would also set better times, but it became apparent very early on that this would not be the case.
My best time in the Grande Punto had been 54.39 seconds (which I will continue to claim as the best ever for a standard front-wheel drive car unless anyone tells me different), so it was slightly disappointing that my first practice run was a 56.05. Not that I'd been expecting to match my previous time so early in the proceedings, of course, but I'd thought I would be closer than that.
The obvious difference between the two cars was what happened when you took them to the limit through a corner. In the case of the Grande Punto, you got a small amount of oversteer as the rear tyres decided they'd had enough, and the correct response to that was to straighten the steering and keep your foot flat on the throttle. The 500's response in the same conditions was to lose grip at the front, causing understeer which required you to back off the power slightly.
(And there lies the difference between road and competition driving: on the public highway, the 500 feels absolutely planted on the tarmac, and you would have to be a congenital idiot to get it to the point where you started losing grip. In a motorsport situation you reach that point almost immediately.)
So that was what I learned on the first practice run, and from then on the job was to deal with it and get on with bringing the times down. The next run was a 55.75 - again, not quite what I'd been hoping for. For the third, I decided that I'd been too clinical about the whole business so far and needed to get the adrenalin flowing.
I spent about then minutes before that run working myself into a right old state, which seemed to work. I crossed the finish line thinking that I'd gone much faster this time, but when the timing clock came into view it was reading 55.65.
All that effort and passion for one measly tenth of a second? It was so disappointing that I went immediately into hissy fit mode, and pointed the 500 into the holding paddock at the top of the hill by means of a handbrake turn. Very juvenile, of course, and I was lucky not to be chastised for it by the organisers, but it did get me a round of applause from the drivers who had already made their runs, which made me feel slightly better.
I wasn't the only one struggling to find time. While Alisdair and Stephen were improving by several tenths every time they went up the hill as their motorsport experience grew, Howard (who had never driven at Doune before but has had a long and successful career in rallying) found himself doing almost exactly the same time on three consecutive runs. By now we'd reached close of play on Saturday, and it seemed like the best thing we could do would be to have a good night's sleep.
And yes, it did help. My first run on Sunday - and the last practice run, the one before we would start competing in earnest - was a 55.81, which seemed miserable but actually had a lot going for it. Everything that went wrong did so at the bottom of the hill. Doune has two split timing points, one 20 metres from the startline and one about a third of the way up. I had been a tenth slower than Howard off the line, and even further behind Stephen (who was spot on with his technique right from the start and was making the 500 take off like a dragster), and something needed to be done. I needed to do some experimenting, and on this run I got it completely wrong, losing a quarter of a second in those first 20 metres.
As if that wasn't bad enough, as I passed the next split timing point I realised that the interior of the car was a lot cooler than it had been previously. And why? Because some fool had left the air-conditioning on, that's why. And the fool in question, in case you're wondering, was myself. I turned it off immediately (possibly becoming the first person ever to do while actually driving up Doune in competitive circumstances), but I must have been losing power until then.
My split time for the lower part of the hill was half a second slower than I had managed the previous day. I conferred with Howard and asked whether a the ongoing effect of a quarter-second disadvantage at the start, plus power loss arising from driving with the air-conditioning on, could have added up to half a second, and he said it very well might have done.
That was good news, and so was the fact that my time from the split point to the top of the hill was my best of the weekend so far. Despite the minor disaster of my first attempt on Sunday morning, the competition runs looked like they were going to be better than I would have imagined the previous day.
And indeed they were. The first one was a 55.33, my best by more than three tenths, and that was rather satisfying. But as I was looking at the split times I reckoned I could do better. It had taken me 20.01 seconds to get to the split point, and if you can do something - or in this case just over a third of something - in 20.01 seconds you obviously want to do it in 19.99 seconds or better the next time you try it. On top of that, although the overall time was the best yet, I hadn't been as quick over the upper part of the course as I had in the fourth practice run. That was going to have to be fixed.
One more run to go, then. I lost three hundredths in the first 20 metres but regained them all, plus another two, before I reached the split point, and if you've been keeping track of the numbers you'll realise that this means I did indeed get there in 19.99 seconds. Great - but I didn't know about it at the time. There was still business to be done.
It nearly went badly wrong a few seconds later. One of the key corners at Doune is called Junction, a righthander with a steep approach and a slightly downhill exit. You want to brake as late as possible there, but I had already been doing that all weekend. I wasn't aware of doing anything different this time, but as soon as I touched the middle pedal the car jumped sideways. At 85mph or so. With barriers all around.
But when you're in a motorsport situation you don't think about the possibility of crashing. You just want to keep going as quickly as possible. And I have to say it all worked out rather well, though I'm not sure if I did much to help. Basically, the 500 slithered the remaining few yards to the apex of the corner, and when it got there I realised that it was pointing in more or less towards the next straight and all I had to do was get back on the throttle as soon and as hard as possible.
I don't know if I gained or lost time through all this. Either way, the result was that I matched my previous best time in the upper section of the hill, and in combination with the much better lower section this brought the total time down to 55.08 seconds. Wonderful. Of course, part of me thought, "Damn, if I can do a 55.08, I could have done a 54," but if you had told me 24 hours previously that I would end up with a time like that I would have been very happy, and not a little incredulous.
Have you noticed anything here? All this effort, this weekend of experimenting, and of constantly thinking about how to improve, and of driving as hard as I knew how, resulted in a total improvement of less than one second. It takes you a similar amount of time to read this sentence. That's how intense hillclimbing is.
And if any of the above has inspired you to take up the sport yourself, firstly I would recommend it very strongly, and secondly I would suggest that an Abarth 500 would be a fun and friendly companion. That second opinion is shared by Graeme Wight Jnr, who was watching our team's efforts with interest, and since he is a double British Hillclimb Champion his views are worth taking seriously.
