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Prescott Hillclimb (James Went to a Thing)

James Whitehead

As a bit of a change of pace from my normal adventures to various race tracks around the country I decided to take a short trip over to Prescott Hillclimb for the weekend for the double header of events they had running, a smaller club meeting on the Saturday and the Midlands Hillclimb Championship (MHC) present on the Sunday.


Weather was thankfully good for both days, aside from being a bit too sunny for my tastes, it led to consistent conditions that gave people plenty of clean runs and a largely red flag free event, aside from a local pheasant invading the track on both days, a truly British disruption to proceedings.


My visit was mostly a social one, as Hillclimb paddocks from my experience being the best paddocks in the country to spend time in. Any question you ask you get a fully fledged answer to, a refreshing change compared to plenty of circuit racing paddocks I’ve visited. I often see attempts at secrecy, which amusingly are rarely of any use against the observant onlooker, and the secrecy is often a good sign to avoid doing what that team thinks is effective in my experience at club level.


A curious Morgan 3-wheeler

There’s always good variety in cars at these events, especially among the road car groups of competitors, everything from a modern sports or supercar like an Alfa 4C or 911, angry little hot hatches such as a Renault Twingo with an Alpine F1 inspired livery, or a personal favourite in the form of a pre war Bugatti, cable brakes and the gear selector being on the outside of the car just make it look like such an event to drive and there’s so much personality to that kind of car. I find the thought of a car where every run feels like an adventure very very appealing, although that may say more about my sanity than anything else.


I always make sure to make time to go round the single seaters in the paddock, there’s some incredibly interesting development that happens on them, and some curious design conventions. One that’s always interested me is the use of a monoshock front end on every single seater design currently in competition, mainly from my conversations this has been in pursuit of minimum weight over all else, in a trade off against ultimate control of the front end this is viewed as worthwhile.


Most of the pictures I took were focused on aerodynamic elements I noticed, the only exception is a rather lovely machined upright off Scott Moran’s Gould, if memory serves it’ll have been manufactured using a DMG Mori CNC; it clearly produces art.


Front Left Upright from a Gould GR59M

The first thing that caught my eye is the fin on this Empire Evo 3. Shark fins aren’t a common feature for one of these cars so it’s appearance interested me, chatting to the owner, the engine cover on this car is based off that of a turbo car, so the geometry is a bit different. I never got round to asking if its difference was discernible to the driver, although given its size it wouldn’t surprise me if the effect is minimal.


Empire Evo 3

The biggest event of the weekend for me was the people I got to meet and spend time with during my adventures around the paddock. On Saturday I came across an orange Empire Wraith that had caught my eye, it was missing its engine cover, which I would discover is due to the plenum on this car not fitting under it so they chose to run the car without it. It was driven by Zach Zammit who was accompanied by his cousin Matthew, both over from Malta and both very capable drivers, although Matthew wasn’t doing any driving while he was over in this country. 


They were happy to discuss things at length with me, and they occasionally make the hop over from Malta to come and race over here, usually racing the hills in Malta. They seem to enjoy the change and the experience of a driver who’s competed in FIA Hillclimb Masters shows, he’s rapid, simply put and was from the first run I saw him. The car control was visibly exceptional and the times showed as much. We might be doing a little bit of work with them on their data analysis through Motec i2. 


Zach Zammit's Empire Wraith engine bay

Their visit was largely if memory serves to spend time with one of the absolute legends of sport, that being John Beattie. To me John Beattie is practically a god of the sport, arguably best known for helping create the Manic Beattie, a sports libre hillclimb car, with a bespoke chassis and a body that looked roughly like a Mallock. The fun part of this was the power unit, it’s a Cosworth BDT fed by a helicopter gas turbine to supply a constant boost pressure. It’s seriously interesting stuff and something you’d only see in hillclimb. I’d absolutely love to see it out racing in person one day, I believe it’s recently been out and about again as I saw it on Alex Summers’s Instagram recently at Gurston Down.


For those curious about the Manic Beattie, here’s the link to it short history of it, this comes from John Beattie’s own business:


John Beattie was an utter joy to talk to and a wealth of knowledge, as you can imagine for someone who’s been working in this industry for over 50 years. We found ourselves talking a lot over the next couple of days, 5 hours or so at my count. It’s always a pleasure to meet engineers with a deep passion for the industry. Many nerdy topics were covered, such as the fact that the Mannic Beattie has a 24 layer ECU map, which frankly terrifies me. 


It would be a huge honour to have him attend any race meetings we were at, I’d happily invite him to anything we were racing at, plus it’s always a pleasure to pick his brains and listen.

He’s worked with all sorts, including Subaru’s WRC cars, which led to an immediate discussion about the famed rocket antilag system used on those cars. He seems to have been fairly active in rallying around the times of Richard Burns and Colin McRae, and we discussed both these legends at length. He’s also worked on Formula 1 and Formula 2 engines, as well as many Super 2000 rally cars and in general anything that went racing. This included a fun story about building a Hart F2 and Ferrari F1 engine for a client to be sent to Laguna Seca… from Bermuda. I imagine that phone call must have been an interesting one.


Finally, I came across this venturi tunnel arrangement on this GWR Predator and it was so unusual I had to grab a picture of it.


Strange venturi tunnel setup

I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here, obviously it’s been designed this way with good reason and I have my own theories. But I’d be curious to hear the thoughts of others on it. It's been living rent free in my head ever since I saw it and there’s been plenty of discussion in the TSE engineering team about it. We’re pretty sure it’s some kind of flow control strategy, but without getting our own hands on the car, or finding the owner (believe me I tried) this is impossible to prove. If any readers have literally any clue about what this might be, feel free to let us know as we’re quite frankly stumped too (a rare occurrence for us!). 


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