Highclere Hillclimb, Tasmania

Following on from SGM's post on Penguin:

The Nwcc thought about having a re-run of the climb to celebrate the clubs 50th anniversary in 2005 but the Track license requirements and amount of houses on the course made it unviable. I believe the main reason the hillclimb was discontinued was because of housing development encroaching on the track. Yes the club went to the Highclere course in 1975 and we still use it twice a year making it the longest running hillclimb in Tassie. In between we had a couple of years at Flowerdale for which we have no information whatsover. The image below (if it works!) is of John Zeigler in the ex Alan Ling ex Geoghegan Holden. I would say it was taken at the position of picture 13 of Dennis's.

http://s56.photobuck...illclimb002.jpg

Dennis, I would love to see your pics of highclere if you can dig them out.

Edited by 275 GTB-4, 23 October 2012 - 10:15.

Great photos! I wonder what year this is?
Highclere hillclimb was first held in December 1975 and is still running today. It is situated approximately 15 minutes South of Burnie in the North West of Tassie. The course is just over 1 km long and is held on a closed Public road, as all Tasmanian hillclimbs are. It came into being after the demise of the very popular Penguin Hillclimb and the short lived Flowerdale Hillclimb. With lessons learnt from these events Highclere was chosen because it is well away from houses and not likely to get 'built out' by suburbia.
The initial record holder was local constructor/competitor in his Turnham GM6 sportscar at 37.6 seconds. This was then beaten by a young John Bowe in his 1600cc Elfin 700 at 33.74 sec. on 11/12/76. This record stood unbeaten for 26 years. A young David Parsons also competed at Highclere in the late 70's early 80's and he held the over 3000cc record for some years in an L34 Torana. Actually his spectacular efforts in a stock six cylinder XY Falcon have passed into local folklore!

SGM...good to hear from you...but shirley! some Taswegians must have more pictures from Highclere....were cameras banned?? film in short supply??

Yes cameras were banned in Tasmania until recently. We didn't want mainlanders to see what a great place it is down here because they would all want to move here....
We have a lot of photos from the latter years but not much from the early days. I guess hillclimbs were never as popular as other events.
I am sure there is a treasure trove of old photos out there. You know, the keen motorsport fan with a half decent camera. He takes photos at all the events he goes to and then after a while moves on to something else. What lurks in the back of cupboards across the country waiting to be discovered?

According to SGM, Highclere was about a kilometre long, according to others, it ran from the creek in the gully back towards the main road and town of Highclere (discuss :-)

The NWCC programs in this period were very basic roneoed sheets - the scan below is from meeting in either 1975 or 1976 when John Bowe and Geoff Forsyth ran their Elfin and Cheetah respectively. The program is not dated.


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My slide box tells me that I attended three meetings at Highclere:
13 December 1975
10 January 1976
December 1976

I can distinctly remember getting booked for speeding at Ridgely on way to one of them!

I will scan slides during the week.

Rob Saward