Fairfax 4.0T

Well I did it!!!. I attended this Hill Climb race (Giant's Despair Hill Climb in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania) many times as a child. It's only about 2 or 3 miles from the house I grew up in (and where my mother still lives). I was always in awe of the race cars that ran and thought that it would be really cool to run this race.

The Giants Despair Hill Climb is one of the oldest motor sports events in the world, starting in 1906. It is now an SCCA Time Trials event that runs exactly one mile up a paved mountain road and climbs 650 feet. For all you math wizards, this is 650/5280 or an average of a 12.3% grade. (The average grade in the Pikes Peak hill climb is 7%). More details on the hill climb can be found <A HREF="http://www.pahillclimb.org/Courses/Giants.htm">here.</A>

I had two goals for this race: (1) Not crash; and (2) Equal Carol Shelby's driving performance in 1951 by breaking the one minute mark. Well I did not crash, and my best time was 54.XX seconds, so I met both goals.

A video of my best run can be found <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y9T--4peac">here.</A>

A video of what happens when you come too far inside on the Devil's Elbow turn is <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffco-pmdjQ4">here.</A> This is a really wild video of the VW and shows the negative camber once the double yellow lines are crossed, and how easy it is to lose it. Unfortunately, the driver of the VW died of a heart attack later in the year.

The difficult things about this race for me were (1) balancing between pushing the car harder versus killing myself; and (2) Hoosier road racing tires that did not have any heat in them until the afternoon.

There were quite a lot of spectators at this event which made it cool. My wife had a great time taking pictures of the fans. I was used to going to Porsche/Audi/VW events from the DC region with well groomed people. The people at these events were not like this.

Here are some of the pics:

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The record holder (38 seconds) in a 950hp former Indy car (or so the newspaper said).
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Note the Audi bumper sticker on the side.
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BlueDog

Congrats on a good run and keeping the shinny side up!

Jimax

Congrats on meeting both of your goals. That looks like a lot of fun.

4Rings::G2 boosted::

Congrats Jim, I bet it was more fun then should be legally allowed

apk-S4

Awesome, Jim. Congrats and I'm glad you had so much fun.

Silver Streakin'

looks like a blast! was that yellow S4 there? he usually does the hill climbs around PA

arob

Nice! Glad you had fun.

apk-S4

How many times did you get to run the course?

Fairfax 4.0T

The only Audi was a black and orange GT Coupe. No S4s this time. The Coupe did not know any of us

Fairfax 4.0T

water park, and I did not want to have a 4+ hour drive back home towing the trailer while being heat exhausted.