Miata Club & Manila Sports Car Club

Sports and Vintage Car Hill Climb

November 2004

The Miata Club Philippines and the Manila Sports Car Club held the annual Sports and Vintage Car Hill Climb at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Olongapo last November 27, 2004.  The event is part of the yearly Philippine Motorsports Festival that has been held at Subic Bay at this time of the year, every year, since 1998.  The competition is open to all sports cars of any year model, and vintage cars from 1972 and earlier.  Spectators are welcome to come and watch the competition as well as to see the assembly of car enthusiasts’ machinery.  This year’s hill climb was sponsored by JVSP Battery Station, exclusive distributors of Outlast Batteries.

A hill climb is a traditional motor-sports competition in which participants driving their vehicles are individually timed in runs up through a meandering hillside road course.  In this case, the course is set over an approximate kilometer length portion of Aparri Road in Subic, officially closed-off for the event by the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority as a safety precaution.  The hillside road course, flanked on either side by the lush jungles of Subic, ascends rather steeply throughout the course and is replete with numerous switchbacks and decreasing radius turns, providing exhilarating challenges even for the best and most agile of cars and the most skillful of drivers.  Participants were given the entire morning session to practice and in the afternoon the official timed runs began in which the best of 3 runs for each of the participants were recorded.

This annual event indulges spectators, participants and enthusiasts alike with thrilling competition as well as a hearty gathering of a multitude of sports cars and muscle cars of all kinds - vintage, classic and contemporary.  This is an entire day in the presence of provocative sports and vintage cars, not only static, but more importantly - in action.  It is a sensory overload for any car enthusiast, all morning and all afternoon spent watching cars drift spectacularly through the numerous turns, amidst the sounds of snorting intakes and exhausts from a variety of taut, tension-filled high-performance engines, each and every one of them ripping high rpm notes through the jungle, combined with the smell of burnt rubber, friction materiel, oil and fuel – wholly spent in the spirit of friendly competition and camaraderie.  There were 40 competitors this year and their cars ranged from a 50’s era Porsche 550 Spyder (the same kind which gained notoriety in James Dean’s terminal drive) to the very latest Ferrari 575 Maranello, all, without exception, being flogged and driven to the utmost potential of their more than adequate performance envelopes.

For six years running since the inception of this event including this year, the King of the Hill, the car with the fastest time in the competition, across all classifications, has been the Mazda Miata/MX-5.  Although the drivers that have won the title of “King of the Hill” have varied over the years, all, without exception, have invariably driven Mazda Miata/MX-5’s towards the title.
 

The winners for the 2004 hill-climb, their cars and their respective times are as follows:

The Sports and Vintage Car Hill Climb is a regular event held on November of each year and everyone is invited to participate or to just come and watch and see the cars perform.  If you missed it this year, you can always join or watch next year. For more information on the hill-climb and other events of the Miata Club Philippines, the club has a website at www.miataclub.ph., likewise the Manila Sports Car Club’s website is www.manilasportscarclub.org.

Joey Bernardez 05.12.04

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