Wednesday 30 September 2015

The Longest Day

Between this picture - taken at 8.15 a.m.


and this picture of the Championship Top Ten taken at 6.15 p.m.


stretched a very long day at Loton Park on Sunday.

A number of lengthy delays in the first set of runs meant that they did not finish until after 2 and, after a short lunch break, the second set started at 3.35 and fortunately there were fewer delays.

There may be a number of people reading this who do not attend hillclimbs regularly and so the faces above may be unfamiliar to you so, for the record: sitting in the car is Alex Summers (2015 Champion) and then the others from left to right are Wallace Menzies (3rd), Dave Uren (6th), Scott Moran (4th), Alastair Crawford (8th), Tom New (5th), Will Hall (7th), John Bradburn (standing) (9th), Jos Goodyear (sitting) (10th) and Trevor Willis (2nd).

Alex, of course, had won the Championship last week at Doune but all the other positions were capable of change. Wallace, Trevor and Scott all had their eyes on second but Trevor sealed this with two steady runs to 4th in each run-off. After a second and a third for Wallace and a third and win for Scott they were tied on 205 (for their 27 best scores - actually Scott only scored in 22 rounds) but because Wallace (seen here at Museum Corner) had actually dropped a score (4 scores in fact) he was placed above Scott.


Tom New came into the weekend in 5th position but could have been overtaken by Dave Uren and / or Will Hall but a 10th and a 7th confirmed his 5th place (his highest finish since he first broke into the top ten in 2006) while Dave Uren took advantage of Will's car being unavailable since Shelsley to move above him into 6th place - an event that had seemed very likely considering Dave's late season upsurge in points - he scored 83 points in the second half of the season as against 38 in the first half! Dave is seen here on Sunday dealing with a touch of oversteer at Museum Corner:



While the injured Jos Goodyear entered the meeting in 8th place he only had a 2 point advantage over both John Bradburn and Alastair Crawford who were tied on 85, and, although Alastair failed to qualify for the second run-off, a 6th place in the first compared to John's 8th and 9th meant they remained tied on 90 points, now above Jos who therefore finished 10th.

Alastair had appeared in 26 rounds and John in 28, but John's dropped score was actually a 0! The next tie-breaker is actually the number of hill records and they were equal there as well as neither had recorded any and so it went to the third tie break which says the highest number of best places - both had scored 1 4th place but it was Alastair's two 5th places as against John's one 5th place that swung it his way! When you think about it, it was John's exclusion for excessive noise from the second run off at Prescott in April which ultimately cost him as the points scored in that run-off, and he had set a time good enough for 3rd place, would have been enough for him to have finished 8th in the final reckoning.

Here is John in action at Barbon in July


and Alastair at Harewood in May


And there was of course another National Championship settled on Sunday - the Avon Tyres / TTC Group MSA Leaders to give it its full name. Before the meeting the points situation had Colin Satchell on 81, Ed Hollier on 78 and Alex Summers on 75 (though the programme, and indeed the BHC website) had Alex on 79 which caused Colin some unnecessary worry!

If Colin (below) won his class then he would increase his total to 84 (or 85 with a record), but anything else would not improve his score beyond 81 (unless in the unlikely situation he was second in class with a record!). If Ed won his class he would also get to 81 while a record would give him the extra point and give him 82. If Alex won his class with a record he would only get to 79 so in reality he was not a factor. But of course if he really did have 79 points then a class win and a record would have given him 83 - so you can see why Colin thought he had something to worry about!!


 If Colin and Ed tied on 81 then Colin would win the Championships because he had dropped scores he could add on. Overall the odds were on Colin winning - Ed (below) had to get the record to have a chance to deprive him.



In practice Colin had got to within 5/100ths of Keith Murray's record - 55.46 against a record of 55.41 and so things were looking good for him. Ed had a very difficult record to aim at - Jos Goodyear's 44.75. Ed's best at the June meeting had been 47.75 and he improved that to 47.32 in practice, second quickest behind Eynon Price.

Come Sunday morning and the track was still a bit slippery after the overnight mist and Colin recorded 56.54 to lead the class by nearly a second from Steve Bailey's Escort. Steve's second run was an improvement to 55.95 - he was really pushing on


and then disaster for Colin as a drive shaft broke in the first part of the climb! So he would finish second on the day and add nothing to his score of 81. This was only his second breakdown of the year - the gearbox went at Wiscombe but with only 2 starters there that was not such a disaster as he would only have scored 4 points for winning.

So how was Ed doing? - well in the first run he had recorded a 48.16 to lie third behind Eynon Price and Richard Spedding and still a long way from the record. He improved to 47.48 second time up but he slipped to 4th as Sean Gould overtook him - so not enough and Colin Satchell was the Leaders Champion. But of course Colin still thought that Alex had a chance owing to the incorrect total in the points table and it was only when Scott Moran won the big single-seater class, beating Alex into second place that he felt able to relax....

Ironically the points situation was exactly the same as it was at the start of the meeting - Colin on 81, Ed on 78 and Alex on 75. I will review all the classes in my next blog post in a week or so.

Sorry - I said much earlier in my blogging year that I would not be doing a nuts and bolts analysis of each and every round, but it looks like I have just done one, with washers aplenty too!!  So here is a car to break up the words:


And no - it is not the Clerk of the Course - more about it later!

Colin became the first driver to win the Leaders with a roof over his head since Tony Lambert did it in a Ferrari in 1993 while he is the first to win it in a saloon, as opposed to a silhouette on a sports car chassis, since John Meredith in 1977! He attended every one of the 14 rounds and set 5 new hill records, on hills he had never seen before - Prescott (twice), Harewood (twice) and Barbon Manor. As he is based in Holsworthy in Devon it was a marathon year for him and he reckons he covered 10,000 miles in total. And he is going to do it all again next year!!

Apart from the BHC contenders who attended all the rounds (and in fact only 5 did that - Menzies (Mr and Mrs), New, Summers and Willis), only one other driver made 14 appearances and that was Allan McDonald who had almost as long a drive as Colin from his Dalbeattie base at the other end of the country.

And then to round off his year he had a marshall standing in his way doing his best Chinaman against the tank impersonation!


What was actually happening was that Allan had conked out on Cedar Straight and the marshall was guiding him backwards into safety which he found near here:


So why was it such a long day - the first cars were on the hill at 0830 and it was still a little damp from the fog as the early classes set out and Anthony Record was the first to find this out as he begins to spin his way around at Triangle:


If I was a runner in A1 or A2 I would actually find it a bit annoying that my class was always the one to be first on the track - often damp from morning dew or overnight rain - why are the classes not rotated from meeting to meeting so that sometimes it is classes C and D that go out first or even the smaller single - seaters?

At Loton everybody who completed 2 runs in Class A1 improved on their second run - by an average of 2.75 seconds while in A2 the 14 cars out of the 16 that improved their times did so by an average of 2.65 seconds, the majority these improvements being, I would wager, owing to the damp morning track - now I am not saying that the same would not be the case if other classes went first - it is just that this kind of 'pain' should be spread around more evenly.

One of the stars of A2 was John Harding in his E Type, seen below, who came 6th beating off a few Porsches and Japanese turbos!


Thee was also a bit of English / Welsh needle of course as this was the day after the night before when Wales shocked England in the Rugby World Cup. In the first run it was Welshman Nigel Burke (below) who led the way in his multi-hued Subaru, just 0.17 seconds up on Englishman Robert Lancaster-Gaye's Porsche.


In the second runs Robert (below) posted a 59.74 to take the lead and Nigel could only respond with a 59.86 - by such small margins are national slights settled!!



From 0930 to 1030 there was no activity because of the local church service and then once we started into the runs again we had a long delay after Lee Griffiths had gone off at Loggerheads / Fletchers Dellow and apparently "uncovered a fresh piece of rock" that had to be protected by a new tyre barrier - would be great if somebody could explain this a bit better - this what we got from the commentators who sounded as baffled as I still do! Shortly after that Tricia Davis went off at Hall and there were further red flags as the track was cleaned up after people had left the track! So all in all time quickly passed and lunch was eventually taken at just after 2!

There was a rumour that a single seater had been lost under this car and the delay was caused by trying to find it


but this was found to be just a scurrilous rumour and Nick Tart's little March 708 was found safe and well in another part of the paddock



I guess it was just one of those days when we have a bad morning and certainly the afternoon was a bit quicker although Carl Jones spread his gearbox and oil all over the track and Colin Satchell had to be recovered after breaking his drive shaft, but after Allan McDonald's problem, described above, the event ran through with no more failures until the top 12 run-off when amazingly three of the runners failed to finish.

Paul Haimes was the first to go when he spun approaching Triangle to conclude his BHC campaign after a difficult season with electrical problems - his best results actually came at the very first meeting of the year at Prescott (where the car is seen below) with a class win and a 5th place in the second run-off but a whole run of problems meant that he scored no points after Barbon in early July and eventually finished 16th overall.


Then in quick succession Will Hall and Eynon Price hit problems in the lower reaches of the hill so that only 9 runners scored points for the only time this year.

But back to the car they were all talking about - and not necessarily for this reason!


The Multi-Car Challenge for 2015 came to an end with the biggest of their challenges - how to get a tow-car, sorry Touareg, up the narrow confines of Loton Park!

In the end it only took Alisdair Suttie 68.06 seconds to do it as for only the second time this year he beat his more experienced teammate, David Finlay, who achieved the ascent in 68.68 seconds. Alisdair's other victory over David came in their smallest car of the year, the little Abarth at Harewood in May, Alisdair seen here taking the last corner 'flat' in the Italian roller-skate.


 The good news for us spectators is that they will be doing the same thing again next year as they have manufacturers queueing up to offer them cars!

So for the last time - favourite cars of the meeting - there were a number cars I had not seen before during the year and so the top 3 are:

Mike Reece's Subaru Impreza


 Thomas Taylor's Mini (well that was predictable)


and Dave Watkins' eye-dazzling Triumph TR8 - I don't think many left the factory looking like this!


Then to round off the day we had Wallace Menzies' phantom record - at least for those watching the timing display at Triangle. With two cars to run Alex led the way on a 44.32 and then Wallace's time came up on the display as 43.47 - a new outright record but then we heard the commentators say 44.47 - cue derision from the crowd about blind commentators.

Scott then went up and did a 43.66 and so in the crowd's eyes Wallace had won but a telephone call to the commentary box brought the explanation that it was the timing computer that showed 44.47 for Wallace and not the sun shining in the commentators' eyes that had led them to them giving out that time.

About 5 minutes later it was confirmed that it was indeed 44.47  - the explanation for that is found on the thread on Uphill Racers which I started to seek the answer. So nothing devious - just sodding technology again!!

So the end of a long year for lots of people - I have thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope that my postings have been entertaining and informative - I hope so because I am not finished yet!

Shortly I will do my review of the year and the Hillclimb Tour awards will be announced along with an appraisal of all the classes that feature in the Leaders Championship - and for those of a more statistical bent look out for future analyses of drivers' records and performances, not just this year but in the past! Also if you read Speedscene there will be no hiding from me as I hope to do an article for that esteemed publication too!

And remember you can see lots of my photos on Flickr.







Thursday 24 September 2015

It's Summers time at Doune


Yes the sun was shining at Doune (at least on Saturday - but it stayed dry on Sunday too) and we had a scorching hillclimb to go with it. Not only a new champion in Alex Summers but a total of 5 new class records at the end of the day, though in one of those cases there were 8 runs all below the old mark which had stood for 12/13 years.

We might as well start with that one which happened in our favourite class of the year - up to 1100 racing cars. The record had stood to Adam Fleetwood (September 2002) and Mark Budgett (June 2003) at 40.78. In the first class runs Simon Fidoe lowered it to 40.33 and Steve Marr also got beneath it with 40.44. In the first run-off they then showed that more was possible with Steve doing a 39.91 and Simon a 40.21 - but of course not counting as class records. Come the second class runs they made it stick with Simon setting the mark at 39.97 before Steve blew it apart with a 39.43! And then in the second run-off it was Simon on 40.16 and Steve on 39.56 just to prove that the class runs were not a fluke!

Here is Steve pictured at the June meeting at Doune in the PCD Saxon


and Simon at Harewood in June in the Empire Wraith showing the different aerodynamic approaches between the 2 cars.


Another Scotsman setting the heather alight was Les Mutch, newly crowned as Scottish Hillclimb Champion. A troubled run of 40.36 in the first of the class runs was not going to challenge Lee Adams' 37.62 set in the same car but come the afternoon and there was no mistake with a 37.59 to take the record by a narrow margin. This qualified Les in 4th place for the second run-off and he recorded 37.85 in that for a 7th place finish.

Here he is doing a bit of hand-jiving to loosen those muscles before a run!


Another single-seater-equipped Scotsman setting a record was Malcolm Wishart in his Lotus 41C in the classic racing car class (pre -71) where he recorded a 49.43 to break Rob Bremner's record of 50.96 and was also below it on his second run (50.46).  Here is the car in all its glory at Barbon Manor back in July


and Malcolm always displays its history when it is parked in the paddock (I hope this is readable).


The other two records were set in the Road - going Series Production classes. In the up to 2 litre class Jim King's time of 50.94 in his Renault Clio 172 removed Sandy Coghill's 51.07 from the record book,


while in the over 2 litre class Chris Randell's sinister black Mitsubishi Evo8 took 49.26 seconds to dip below Archie Bain's record of 50.04, both of the old records having been set in June 2010.


All 5 of the new record holders are Scottish (which may not be surprising) but also, apart from Malcolm Wishart, the rest all come from the North East with Steve and Les from Aberdeen and Jim and Chris from Inverurie - which is a small town about 15 miles North West of the Granite City - maybe there is something in the water in the area which is also the home of Graeme Wight and Craig and Alan Nicol (Craig holds the record for road-going specialist production cars).

Another hillclimber from the area is Stuart Sugden who drives a GWR Mini. Stuart is a plumber by trade (
he fitted some central heating for my sister) and he must be used to crawling into small spaces to investigate a leak - but here he is getting some practice while father Jim assesses his efforts.


Before we finish on records - in the up to 2 litre single seater class the record stands to Alex Summers at 38.04 from June 2013. The class was won by Dave Uren this week with times of 38.32 and 38.19. Excellent but not record-breaking. Dave's run-off times, however were 37.22(!) and 37.69. Stunning times which will not be recognised except by anoraks like myself (and maybe Jerry and Eddie) but they must not be forgotten. There must be quite a few 'unofficial' records like that which are not recorded in programmes because they were not set in class runs - surely this is a bit unfair?? One hopes they are recorded in club records but somehow I don't think they necessarily will be.


So Alex Summers became the new British champion and he did it in true champion style winning both run-offs. Wallace Menzies set the target in the first one at 35.90 and he was followed by Trevor Willis who had to win to keep alive his hopes, at least for another few minutes. However, gearbox issues which helped him to have all 4 wheels off at the top of East Brae restricted him to 38.96 and so we had a new champion even before Alex took his run but there was no letting up and 35.65 seconds later he had won the run-off and confirmed the title. He would have been excused for taking it easy in the afternoon and his qualifying run was relatively slow at 36.63, but he was still fastest qualifier! Wallace then set a new FTD with 35.54 in the run-off but just minute later that had been surpassed as Alex rounded off the day with 34.82, just 6/100 ths slower than Scott Moran's outright hill record!



This was also the 17th BHC title for Gould cars, equalling the record of Pilbeam, but the dominance of Gould has been greater - only once has that sequence been interrupted, when Trevor Willis won in 2012 while Pilbeam's run was broken 4 times, once of course by Chris Cramer in the original Gould 84 which was present at Doune with both Chris and David Gould driving to celebrate 30 years since that title victory.


There were lots of people interested in the car including this certain constructor whose cars have of course been one of the main challengers to Gould in recent years:


I wonder if he picked up any tips!!

Meanwhile, Gould's dominance has Tim Wilson worried and he is seen here asking Alisdair Suttie if he could organise a Multi-Car Challenge for next year's BHC! Can you imagine 12 Audi S8s!!


It was a Honda Civic Type-R for their penultimate round and it was a superb car which took them to personal bests (I believe) at Doune by the end of the weekend. Next week at Loton should be interesting - has there ever been a bigger car than a VW Toureg to climb Loton (or any hillclimb!)? The Civic passed me on the Monday as I was driving slowly but steadily down the M6 - I just had time to clock the number plate to check it was the very car before it became a little red dot - and no it was not David or Alisdair driving - but what a job for a delivery driver!!

One of the many good things about hillclimbing is the ability for families to share cars and there are many husband and wife combinations on the hills, but also fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons and even three generations all still competing. Are there any mothers and daughters I might have missed I wonder - probably! Having never competed directly against my wife or my sons I often wonder what relationships become like when one of the drivers has a slight coming together with the scenery or suddenly shows a turn of speed and beats the previously dominant partner!!

People watching in the paddock can be fascinating and here are Scott Sheridan and Richard Summers waiting patiently for their wives to return their cars



but it was all OK - and here is Lindsay helping Richard on his way to the start


but it looks as if Lesley wants another shot and Scott reckons the best way to stop her is to sit on her wheel!!

Wheel-sitting is catching and here we catch Steve Owen having a contemplative moment (or is he in the huff) on the wheel of John MacKenzie's OMS 2000M as he waits to attack the hill in the second run-off


Steve was driving the Honda powered OMS number 3 at the weekend - and it is interesting to compare this car, seen below, with the latest OMS product - the BMW powered OMS 28 seen at Loton earlier in the year.



A number of people have said how much they like to see the older photographs in the blog and so here are a few from Doune 21 years ago in September 1994. These are all scanned from prints and so excuse the poorer quality.

And we start with that man Steve Owen who was driving this OMS SC1 - I think I liked the paint job!



And to revert to the present for a moment, Richard Matossian had his version (or is it the same car?) at Doune last weekend


Back to 1994 and my last OMS picture (honestly) for this blog is Mark Lawrence in what is described simply as an OMS 1100.


One of Mark's competitors in the class was David Smith in what is described as Sidewinder 2 - anybody got information on that car?


In my last blog I rated David Seaton's Pilbeam MP43 as one of my favourite cars and here is another one of the 4 chassis that were produced - this is Jim Robinson's car, co-driven here by Rob Fradley - this car then went to Charlie Smith in the Channel Islands.


And finally from 1994 - where it all began for the Moran family in the BHC - this is Roger's MP62 - chassis 4, at that time with 1.6 Vauxhall power, which still competes in the hands of Andrew Henson and Nicola Dearden with some modifications to MP82 spec.


I hope those photos maybe brought back some happy memories.

And so to my favourite cars from the weekend - if you were not there on Saturday you will have missed Lewis Duncan's Hillman Imp as it broke on its second practice run, but here it is trying to look like an Alan Fraser Imp from the 1960s


Secondly - another, even older car - it may have been the slowest car of the day but Roger Williams' Austin 7 Speedex looked like great fun


and my third choice is this very smart Mazda MX5 of Danny and James Clark - I am not really a fan of the MX5 but this one looked particularly smart.


And finally what does a newly crowned champion do to celebrate - well he has a chat with Mum and Dad of course - though it looks like Richard may be a bit emotional - or maybe he just has something in his eye!!


Well done again Alex and looking forward to the final event of the season at Loton Park - I don't know how these guys do all the travelling with their cars / trailers / motorhomes etc - I only have myself to think about and I am pretty tired!!!