This is an annual event and attracts about 140 cars. Dick and Steven Johnson have been guest drivers for the last few years, but only Steven could make it this year. He was invited to drive a Cortina GT in Pre 72 touring cars under 1600cc, and won the class, beating the owner of the vehicle who finished 2ndl! Guess he wouldn't mind too much...
Some of you Aussies might have seen parts of the hillclimb in Ch10's coverage of the QLD Australian Rally Championship round. They have always used the section, sometimes at night! This year they ran it twice. It is the only bitumen stage of the QLD ARC. They use a longer section of the road so the times are not comparable unfortunately!
I got the gearbox changed during the week - what a job that was! I won't go into details, but I had to basically pull the whole bloody car apart to get it out! If anyone is thinking of doing a conversion to a bigger engine, do yourself a favour and weld in an auto tunnel if it doesn't already have one. One day you'll be glad you spent that little bit extra!
It is a bloody scarry place, with big concrete barriers on the outside of the left handers to try and stop cars dissapearing over the edge. They don't always succeed! It rained on and off all Saturday, and it was very slippery, but great fun. On Sunday the weather cleared and we got 3 dry runs. Thankfully there were no serious accidents this year, but a few cars hit the concrete barriers, the worst hit ripping out the front left corner of a corvette.
I was the only 1200 there in Pre-72 Touring cars, but there was a L20 powered 120Y as well. I'm not sure how he went as he was in a different class - invited touring cars (that's any models after 1972 that were accepted due to their significance or just because they are interesting). I had a great dice with a friend of mine, Chris Berry in his Datsun 1600 with 137bhp at the wheels (good thing the 1200 is lighter!). We haven't raced for a couple of years back when the Datsun Club used to run events at Lakeside raceway, and we were always only a matter of tenths apart despite all the fiddling we used to do between meetings. And we were looking foward to seeing how we compared now, as we both have better engines, suspension, and tyres than we did back then. We picked up where we left off with our first run in the wet being 4 tenths apart. And it continued like that all weekend. As conditions improved we both got faster and the gap varied from 1 to 4 tenths with me faster on some runs and Chris on others. The inevitable mind games in the pits kept us entertained between runs as well. The track got faster as the day went on and the sun came out and some rubber got laid down. My best time was on my second last run, a 67.54 on sufering a bit of fuel surge near the finish. Chris did a 67.09 on that run to keep the class lead. I had to top up my fuel tank before the next run, and was pretty confident that I could get Chris without the fuel surge. But I tried a bit too hard on my last run, and overcooked it in the right hand hairpin that leads onto a fast series of third gear flat out corners. I turned in a bit too fast and had to get on the power to drive the car through the corner with a bit of oversteer. Good in theory, but I got it preety wrong and ended up out on the dirt on the exit in a big full opposite lock slide which lost heaps of time. It was dissapointing, because I got everything else pretty right and ended ud with a 68.03 on that run. But, to his credit, Chris managed to go half a second faster on his last run to beat me pretty comprehensively in the end. So I finished second in class to Chris with a Mk1 Mexico Escort 3rd. Got a nice trophy, and a bottle of Fuchs oil.
Datsuns were definitely the most prolific winners of the weekend, with 240Z's taking out both pre-77 sports cars over 2000cc, and Marque Sports. A Sports 2000 coming second in pre-77 sports cars 1601-2000cc. And a 1600 took out Historic Group Nc for logged booked race cars.
We got some in-car video footage in both the wet and my fastest run in the dry, which I will hopefully be able to post a link to later in the week
I didn't get any stills though, but there was a professional photographer there who is suppossed to send out some proofs.
Their site is not updated yet, but you can see some old pics here:
Historic Noosa HillclimbJust one event left for me this year, a club level hillclimb at Mt Cotton - hoping to finally break the 50 second barrier. Wish I had the time and money to do the Bathurst speed weekend - that sounds like a hoot! I'll have to make it there next year...
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