When the chance came to travel West and witness the birthplace of British hillclimbing celebrate its 110-year history, I was sure get my hand up first.
I'd heard much about Shelsley Walsh near Worcester and the art of threading a car across uphill-countryside at silly speeds, but I'd yet to see it done.
For those who don't know, the Shelsley course runs for 914m, gaining 100m elevation over that distance and shrinking to as narrow as 3.66m towards the top of the run. The current course record stands at 22.58 seconds set by Martin Groves back in 2008, which means little written here, without first seeing a monstrously modded Mitsubishi Evo manage 'just' early 30secs.
More specifically, I was attending the August Championship Challenge, an event that has run annually since 12 August 1905, and one that on 16 August 2015 was hosting around 120 entries forming one of the most eclectic paddocks I've ever seen.
To give you an idea, ahead of me sat a row of 600bhp+ formula cars, to the left a collection of cigar racers - featuring a snake-hipped gent with a superb 'tache wriggling into a Cooper with a Chevy V8 as his headrest - and to the right an Audi Quattro S1, Porsche 911 GT3 Cup and various race-prepared Elans.
Within these various categories, the day would decide a range of different championships, including the MSA British Hillclimb, MSA British Leaders and Midland Hillclimbing Championships. But first things first, a quick chin-wag with Matt Nicoll-Jones, founder and owner of Academy Motorsport.
Matt set up the company in 2005, but today, he's just signed off on the firm's third Aston Martin Vantage GT4, and runs the Academy race team which currently competes in the British GT and hopes to compete in Le Mans 24hr in the near future. Even more immediately, he'd just driven one of his GT4s up Shelsley, and he had a big smile on his face.
"We ran it on wets today, which was fun! On slicks, we'd have managed a time in the high twenties, but today was more about playing for the crowd and it would have been a little twitchy. To have been given the chance to drive here was brilliant. Shelsley is very special. I really admire those guys who were setting low 20-second runs," he said.
And what does a man who runs a race team drive day-to-day? Well, after watching a 15-plate Audi S8 put in a silly time given its size and weight, Matt looked nonplussed. "I'm not surprised in a way. I drive a V10 RS6 Avant. It's been hiked to around 700bhp. I think we managed to get 3.8sec to 60mph out of it."
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