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| Hillclimbing With Abarth | ||
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by David Finlay (24 Jun 09) Not that I didn't think it would be an enjoyable event - quite the reverse. But I find that motorsport is more fun the more seriously you take it, and Doune itself is a deeply serious place. It is frequently referred to as the most intimidating hillclimb course on the British mainland (Irish ones, which are all sections of ordinary road closed to the public for the day, are something else again) and it doesn't take long to understand why. Set in rolling countryside about an hour north of Glasgow, it's very pretty, but also very unforgiving. The track length is just under a mile, and for most of the way you can't go off because there is nowhere off for you to go; get it wrong and you will almost immediately smack hard and expensively into a barrier. An odd sort of fun, this.
Abarth supplied two Grande Puntos, expertly looked after by Howard Paterson who, among other talents, is an exceptionally capable driver himself. Two people can share the same car in hillclimbs, and after a brief discussion during which Howard assured us about 27 times that the Abarths were really, honestly, absolutely identical in performance, fellow journalist Bruce Booth and I were allocated the red one while my other colleagues Simon McBride and Alisdair Suttie got the white one. In theory we should have been in the class for standard two-wheel drive production cars, but there was a problem which I'll try to describe in the most concise and least boring way possible. The event was officially open to holders of National A competition licences, but Abarth had supplied us with National B licences, and that meant that we were put into a class filled with all the other National B drivers. Most of these were in cars which were very definitely not standard and we didn't have a hope of beating them, so for us the competition consisted of either just trying to improve every time we drove up the hill or fighting among ourselves for the honour of being the quickest Abarth driver. I went for the first option. Let's get this out of the way right now: I was the fastest of the quartet on each of the six runs we took part in over the course of the weekend, but so I damn well should have been. I had much more motorsport experience than the others, and in particular I was the only one who had competed at Doune. Admittedly, the last time was in 1996, but anyone who has driven at Doune before, even after a gap of 13 years, has an enormous advantage over someone who has turned up for the first time. Rather than getting on my high horse about being the quickest Abarthist, I was deeply impressed by how well the Doune virgins adapted to the situation, and I'm not at all sure I could have done as good a job if I'd been in their position. Our first practice run on Saturday morning was almost literally a baptism in the sense that we were nearly immersed in water. On a soaking wet track, my attention was divided more or less equally into trying to find where the grip was, getting used to driving a standard car up Doune for the first time ever (I'd used modified cars at all previous events and this proved to be a bigger culture shock than I'd expected) and unsuccessfully attempting to make the wipers work on any setting apart from intermittent. Generally, every run you take at a hillclimb gives you information which is going to be useful for the next one, but this turned out to be an exception because the weather improved and the rest of the meeting was held in dry conditions. For that reason the "real" second practice run was the "virtual" first one - all I really had to go on was that the Abarth (which had been fitted with the Assetto brake and suspension modifications and the esseesse kit which boosts the engine's power output from 155bhp to 180bhp) was quite quick in a straight line and had a lot more body movement than I was used to at Doune, even though it feels very stiff on normal roads. Still, that was enough to help me put in a 56.63 second run next time up. It seemed respectable enough, but I now felt that the "lost" first run had put me on the back foot. What I needed was a crazy, aggressive climb - something that could be developed and tidied up later in the weekend - and if I was going to do that it had better be on Saturday, with the important competition runs still some way off. The third run was indeed a bit bonkers. I got far too much wheelspin at the start (enough to lose me two tenths according to the official 64-foot split time) but from then on everything felt very quick, and on at least four occasions I thought I'd overdone it and was about to smack the Abarth into one of the various walls, barriers and trees which line the course. Shortly after you cross the finish line at Doune a clock with your time on it comes into view, and on this occasion it read 55.82 seconds. A definite improvement, of course, but even with that rubbish start I thought I'd done better. Thinking back over it in the hotel that evening, I remembered that on several corners the Abarth had seemed vague and reluctant to go exactly where I wanted it to, and I was wondering what to do about this until the following morning, when Howard changed my thinking entirely by reminding me about the ESP. In view of what followed I should say here that I think ESP is a great idea, and that the system on the Abarth is particularly good. It doesn't bring the car to a shuddering halt, as others seem to, but it does gradually reduce the available power from 180bhp to something it considers more appropriate for the situation. It is, no question, an excellent feature for road use, for a trackday and indeed for pretty much anything else - but not right here and not right now, because it's giving me less drive than I'm expecting at critical points and creating the vagueness that seems to be spoiling the party. And Abarth has arranged things so that you can't switch it off. Okay. Time for a new tactic. For the fourth and final practice run on Sunday morning, let's avoid the ESP. Let's drive the car up to the ESP zone but not into it. That way I'll be making the decisions about how much power is available, not the electronics, and I'll be able to place the car more accurately than I could yesterday. There, how's that? 56.47 seconds? NO!! Now, in normal life losing just over six tenths of a second isn't going to make much difference to your day, but in a motorsport context - especially when you're driving for less than a minute, and more especially when the number of opportunities to improve is diminishing rapidly - it feels like a catastrophe. I'm sorry to say that at this point I had a hissy fit like something out of La Cage aux Folles , and it says a lot for Howard, my colleagues and the rest of the Abarth team that none of them threw bricks at me while it lasted. Perhaps they just couldn't find any bricks. Once I'd finally stopped being a drama queen and started analysing what had happened I realised that the ESP (which I was now more aware of) was still doing its gentle work on almost every corner. Clearly it couldn't be avoided, and equally clearly the correct technique would be to live with it, driving harder than I had just done and predicting, rather than reacting to, the occasional drop in power. So, for the first of the two competition runs (from which the quicker time would be the one that determined our result) I knew I could get back into, say, the mid-55s by going harder than I had on the fourth practice run but not as hard as on the third. Beating 55 seconds, however, seemed unlikely, as I spent a long time telling anyone who even looked as if they were pretending to listen: "Sorry, guys, 55 seconds is as good as we're going to get here. I'll go up there and do my best, and I'm pretty sure I'll get a 55, but anything better than that just isn't going to happen. I'm not going to be able to go eight tenths faster than I did yesterday. This car will not go up Doune in a 54 and that's all there is to it." What a plonker. Next time I saw the clock after the finish line it read 54.92, which on the one hand was good news and on the other hand demonstrated to everyone else that I had been talking out of the wrong end for half an hour. The extra experience of the car and the hill, and the benefits of using the ESP rather than trying to outsmart it, had had a much greater effect than I'd expected. The Abarth had just done something I didn't believe it was capable of, and I was more than happy - though also slightly embarrassed - that it had proved me wrong. One more run to go. Was the 54.92 a fluke, a one-off, something not to be repeated? You'd have thought I'd have learned not to make predictions by this time, but I wasn't sure how much was left. "How pleased will everyone be if that turns out to be the best time I can manage?" I asked Howard. He said he thought everyone would be very pleased, and for a while I thought I would be too. Maybe leaving Doune with a 54.92 would be respectable and admirable and a thing to be proud of and . . .
No. Sod it. Let's go for this. Focus hard - for five minutes before the final run there is nothing in the world except the run. A good start, the best of the weekend, with less wheelspin than any of the others. Now, use every inch of the 12-foot wide tarmac you dare to visit, scream round the unnamed but crucial right-hander faster than ever before, dab the brakes (for the first time since that first wet run) on the approach to the treacherous, blind Oak Tree lefthander because at this speed you will certainly trash the car if you don't, nail it round the notorious uphill Garden Gate bend, all but skimming the armco on the exit as you try to give yourself the best chance for the steep Tunnel section that follows, hurl yourself into Junction faster than seems possible, simultaneously deal with and ignore two big 80mph-plus tail slides through the Meadow, panic-brake up the 1-in-4 climb up East Brae so you can still get round the tight right at the top, brake ridiculously late for the final Esses and thread your way through barriers that seem to get out of your way just as you reach them, then cross the finish line and hold your breath as you approach the clock, a clock which - glory be - has the number 54.39 displayed on it. You never thought before that 54.39 could look like a smile, but today it does. I'm not sure about this (and feel free to let me know if it's not true because I'm prepared to amend this paragraph if necessary) but I believe that 54.39 seconds is the fastest time for a standard front-wheel drive car at Doune. As much as anything, that is a tribute to the Abarth Grande Punto, which is not only powerful for its size but also very user-friendly at its cornering limit. I may have held my breath a few times as the barriers came uncomfortably close while my foot was hard on the throttle pedal, but I never seriously believed that I was about to crash, and if I may say so I think the car's behaviour was part of the reason why my colleagues were able to put up such impressive times on their first visit to Doune. Other standard front-wheel drive machines will certainly go up this amazing hill more quickly, probably in the near future, but in a sense it doesn't matter. Abarth's intention was to show that the Grande Punto can be used as a dual-purpose car, performing normal transport duties during the week and giving its owner the opportunity for some competitive motorsport fun at weekends. I think the point has been proved beyond all doubt. |
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