Uphill Racers - The History of British Speed Hill Climbing

Chris Mason

ISBN 10: 1870519086 / ISBN 13: 9781870519083

Published by Bookmarque Publishing, 1990

About this Item

Most forms of motor racing involve pointing the car in roughly the right direction and hoping everyone else brakes a fraction too late. Hill climbing, however, strips the whole business down to its gloriously uncompromising essentials. There is one road, one hill, one driver, one machine and one rather impertinent stopwatch waiting at the top to reveal whether all that expensive engineering, frantic fettling and pre-race confidence amounted to anything whatsoever. Uphill Racers is Chris Mason?s affectionate and meticulously researched history of British speed hill climbing, one of the oldest, purest and most wonderfully eccentric branches of motorsport. From the Edwardian pioneers who tackled rough tracks with heroic optimism and only a passing acquaintance with suspension, to the astonishing purpose-built machines that now seem capable of climbing walls given sufficient encouragement, this book charts the evolution of a sport where every fraction of a second is earned the hard way. Unlike Formula One, hill climbing has never relied upon glamorous grids, celebrity drivers or fleets of television cameras. Instead, it has quietly nurtured generations of ingenious engineers, fearless competitors and enthusiastic spectators who understand that extraordinary motorsport doesn?t always require a twenty-mile circuit. Sometimes all you need is a steep hill, a strip of tarmac, an alarming gradient and the sort of machinery that appears to have been designed by someone who considered wings, slick tyres and improbable horsepower to be perfectly reasonable ideas. Mason explores the famous venues that have become almost mythical among enthusiasts?places where reputations were made, records were broken and engines occasionally demonstrated an enthusiastic desire to redistribute their internal components across the surrounding countryside. Alongside the venues come the personalities: determined amateurs, gifted professionals and inventive mechanics whose workshops probably contained equal quantities of engineering brilliance and tea-stained optimism. One of the delights of hill climbing is its magnificent refusal to conform to modern notions of sporting excess. There are no tactical pit stops, no tyre strategy debates and very little opportunity to blame anyone else when things go wrong. If the run is slow, it?s between you, the hill and the uncomfortable realisation that gravity was rather less negotiable than you?d hoped. It is motorsport in its most honest form, where success depends on precision, nerve and an almost unreasonable willingness to drive astonishingly quickly towards a bend lined with hay bales. Packed with period photographs, fascinating anecdotes and decades of competition history, Uphill Racers captures not only the technical development of the sport but also the camaraderie that has always surrounded it. Whether your interests lie in vintage specials, legendary drivers, improbable engineering solutions or simply discovering why people voluntarily spend weekends trying to shave three-tenths of a second off a climb that lasts under a minute, there is plenty here to entertain and inform. Condition: Very Good. A thoroughly respectable copy that has clearly spent its years ascending bookshelves rather more gracefully than some of the machines featured within. Clean, sound and ready for its next custodian, it remains in excellent reading condition. Unlike many historic hill climb cars, it requires neither race fuel, valve adjustments nor a team of determined volunteers pushing from behind before it can deliver an immensely satisfying performance.

Seller Inventory # 6763

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Uphill Racers - The History of British Speed Hill Climbing
• Publisher: Bookmarque Publishing
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1870519086
• ISBN 13: 9781870519083
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Fine, 438pp. D/j not price clipped. Condition virtually as new.