Virginia City Hill Climb

Anyone ever go to this, which was last week? It's a 5.2 mile long blocked-off road, with a starting elevation of 5000 feet and an ending elevation of 6200 feet. Street cars only, and no race slicks, but other than that, just about anything goes.

My brother and I towed our cars 525 miles to do it. He's done it twice before while I've never done any hill climbs. To sum it up, he was way faster than me, but it was still a real hoot. This year, a good driver in a Porsche GT2 RS set a new record for the 48-yr(!) event, at 3:09.4, my jerk brother did it in 3:19, and I ran a much more sensible 3:39.

Anyway, here you go:

It's a funny thing, driving around blind turns, wondering if there are wild horses (there are plenty in the area), other animals, people, dirt bikes, never mind spilled coolant and/or oil, etc, etc. Unlike faster drivers, I had a hard time charging around turns where disaster and mayhem could reside, but I could see getting used to it :)

Awesome video!  You look pretty relaxed.

Street cars?  What are you driving?  Appears to be a tad smaller than your average golf cart, but much faster.

Whoa, this looks awesome. I wish I knew about it sooner, maybe next year I'll get to check it out.

1988RedT2 said:

...What are you driving?  Appears to be a tad smaller than your average golf cart, but much faster.

Midlana

how did you do relative to other cars? how many cars were there?

Good question! I'm trying to find out. There was around 65 entrants, and I'm hoping that they list times and car type. Instead, I'm hearing rumors that they may just post the times and the driver(?) That's kinda useless.

Oh, and just for fun, my brother sent me the results list from 1995, in which I would have achieved 5th over all. With the advance of technology and tires, a lot has changed since then!

One of the interesting cars there was a heavily modified Nissan GTR. Figure $80K for the car, then he had $80K worth of mods done, giving him around 1200 hp. My brother and I talked about what we'd buy for $160K, and a Nissan never came up. Anyway, when it was all said and done, that car lost to the Porsche, a 2WD car with 500 hp less.

I noticed you shuffle steer in tighter left handlers but not on right hand corners? Just out of curiosity is there something about the cockpit layout that causes this?

Huh, I didn't realize that. It may be because there's a door diagonal that my left elbow can hit. I'll see what's going on the next time I drive, and thanks for the heads up.