I recall David Franklin drove the 212 at the Fos several years ago as indeed he has the 712, and of course this year with the 312......
This I believe is his 50th year in motor sport......good show all round I reckon.
Posted 06 July 2015 - 22:19
I recall David Franklin drove the 212 at the Fos several years ago as indeed he has the 712, and of course this year with the 312......
This I believe is his 50th year in motor sport......good show all round I reckon.
Advertisement
Posted 07 July 2015 - 07:37
With the mention, above, of last year's end-of-season Masters event at Eschdorf, I think it's worth saying that comparison of the UK and European Hillclimb Championship scenes is difficult, if not impossible, and potentially misleading. The nature of the events and the regulations are rather different.
The comment attributed to Simone Faggioli about course length may be pertinent, but I believe the short length was one of the deliberate choices made in an effort to level the playing field a little and entice contenders from series such as the UK's. (Having said that, SF was uncharacteristically low down the results there - although the weather was unhelpful to many).
The UK cars ran in a different class to the regular Euro contenders. The Euro cars run unsilenced which is a potential advantage - otherwise they run to fairly tight regs, capacity limits, strict minimum weight limits and so on, more akin to the circuit cars they resemble. UK cars have a considerable weight advantage apart from anything else (though that doesn't diminish the impressive performances of the UK drivers on their first visit.
At the daddy of them all, Trento-Bondone, I'm not sure if the UK-type single seaters would have made it to the top of the hill.
The main reason Eschdorf was chosen was the length of the hill. The UK cars run very small capacity fuel tanks and certainly couldn't make it to the top of Trento Bondone without one or even two fuel stops!
Edited by Stephen W, 07 July 2015 - 07:39.
Posted 07 July 2015 - 07:47
I attended Barbon yesterday, Jos Goodyear smashed Scott Moran's 7 year hill record...was 20.50 now 20.08...he went through speed trap at 146 mph !!
The concensus at Harewood the day after was that the speed trap at Barbon Manor hillclimb was optimistic to say the least.
I wondered that...straight after his run, I hoped that the timing system had worked OK as chopping .42 of a sec off the record seemed a big chunk percentage-wise....also, others who went through the trap at 130-135 had problems at the hairpin, seemed inconceivable that at 146 he'd got round no problem...
The speed trap at Barbon has been 'suspect' for some time plus it keeps being moved (not by much though). At Harewood on Sunday before his car broke Jos Goodyear was between 7 and 15 mph down on the Over Two Litre top drivers.
Posted 07 July 2015 - 07:51
And yes Steve - F1 must be respected as the pinnacle of the sport, no matter how much we know it isn't!
I do not disagree that Formula One should be the pinnacle of the sport but the cars and drivers would be shown up in a different discipline like hillclimbing especially when up against the modern machinery. Get them to Selsley Walsh and see what they can do on a proper hill!
Posted 07 July 2015 - 08:04
I do not disagree that Formula One should be the pinnacle of the sport but the cars and drivers would be shown up in a different discipline like hillclimbing especially when up against the modern machinery. Get them to Shelsley Walsh and see what they can do on a proper hill!
Schauinsland would really sort 'em out
Edited by Allan Lupton, 07 July 2015 - 08:05.
Posted 07 July 2015 - 08:06
If the FoS team were to consider a celebration of hillclimbing , it would be wonderful if it could include a selection of some the incredibly innovative, clever and terrifyingly-quick devices that continue to appear on the hills. Some are home-made, others come from small specialist firms.
Two come to mind:
Nic Mann's "Mannic Beattie" which has a Mallock chassis at its core, a highly-developed and laid-on-its-side Cosworth BDT engine developed by John Beattie, a gas turbine that both provides the BDT with lag-free boost and also drives a blown diffuser for added downforce, and four-wheel-drive. It is beautifully engineered, in my view, and it sounds like nothing else. It is also astonishingly quick. have a look at this:
Chris Cannell's Force SR8 with its twin side-by-side Hayabusa engines is equally impressive:
Christopher W.
I was trying to keep to currently available cars that had competed succesfully in the BHC up to 1985. If we open it up to cars right through to the current era we would fill the entry list!
There are any number of technically-fascinating cars from UK hill climbing (the Squires-Kidsley Brabham 'Lysholm', or its turbocharged variant, anyone?) but whether they can be 'sold' as a broad-appeal concept with the Goodwood context, I don't know. It would be interesting to know how many such older machines still exist.
That is the problem; so many older BHC cars have been (1) cut-up to make new ones; (2) raided for parts and what is leftover has been rotting away in a barn ever since; (3) painstakingly restored to their former circuit racing glory; and (4) been sitting in collections not being run and becoming a potential money pit to restore.
The Phil Scragg Lola T70 was mentioned but I believe that has gone back to being a normal spyder rather than the abreviatted version Scragg & Harrison used.