Lemon's X47 track ST

[lemonjs]

I attended a hill climb school yesterday at Gurston Down. The format was along the lines of:

1. Class room time discussing the track, hill climb as a sport in general, and information on their club
2. Track walk with an instructor that included commentary on the corners, breaking/accelerating points etc
3. Convoy runs with the instructor in the lead
4. Individual runs throughout the day with instructor feedback after every run (they each took a section of the track)

I wanted to see if hill climb was a potential starting point for motorsport for me instead of time attack or proper circuit racing as it would be considerable cheaper.

While I enjoyed the day and had great fun driving, the value is pretty terrible when you consider a run is 40-45 seconds and you need to wait for the other 25 cars to finish. The total seat time for the day was around 8 minutes, with the remainder of the day waiting around in the sun. The price is similar to a full track day where I'd get easily 1.5 hours of seat time, with the limitation being how much time I want to spend in the car.

Most of the day was hot and dry, but it rained for the last two runs.



A real mixture of cars:



It looks pretty slow on the video, but it was quite scary given how narrow it was!:

I'll probably take it easy for the next month and get the car prepped for the Nurburgring.

 

[Fusion Works]

Hold up, they give you a class, track walk, etc for your hill climbs? That is pretty cool. They just pointed at the road up the mountain and said "Go", we were on our own to figure it out.

 

[hawyee]

While I enjoyed the day and had great fun driving, the value is pretty terrible when you consider a run is 40-45 seconds and you need to wait for the other 25 cars to finish. The total seat time for the day was around 8 minutes, with the remainder of the day waiting around in the sun. The price is similar to a full track day where I'd get easily 1.5 hours of seat time, with the limitation being how much time I want to spend in the car.

That's similar to autocross in the US except for that you have to work the course as well when you aren't driving, so I think hill climb would be a better value for seat time. Where else do you get to full send on a public road as well? Also the competition aspect is really what makes it worthwhile, class wins can and often are decided by tenths or hundredths of seconds in those events. Hill climb is on my list as well of fun things to do with the bean eventually

 

[M-Sport fan]

^^^I forgot if your car has at least a certified roll bar in it or not, but most hillclimb sanctioning bodies here in the states (including the ones run under SCCA Solo 1 rules and regs) require at least that for the slower classes, and full wheel to wheel spec cages for the upper, faster classes.