Shelsley Walsh Speed Hill Climb
| Location | Shelsley Walsh, Worcestershire, England |
|---|---|
| Time zone | GMT |
| Opened | 1905 |
| Major Events | British Hill Climb Championship |
| Hill Length | 0.568 miles (1,000 yd) |
| Hill Record | 22.58 (Martin Groves, 2008, British Hill Climb Championship) |
The Shelsley Walsh Speed Hill Climb is a hillclimb in Shelsley Walsh, Worcestershire, England, organised by the Midland Automobile Club (MAC). It is one of the oldest motorsport events in the world, and is in fact the oldest to have been staged continuously (wartime excepted) on its original course, first having been run in 1905. On that first occasion, the course was 992 yards (907 m) in length, but in 1907 it was standardised at 1000 yards (914 m), the length it remains today.
Shelsley Walsh is a notably steep course by the standards of today's hillclimbs. It rises 328 feet (100 m) during its length, for an average gradient of 1 in 9.14 (10.9%), with the steepest section being as much as 1 in 6.24 (16%). This makes Shelsley a hill on which power is important, and on which the gap in times between the most powerful cars and the rest is greater than at many other venues. It is also narrow, being no more than 12 feet (3.66 m) wide at some points.
The winner of the first event, held on Saturday 12 August 1905, was Ernest Instone (35 hp Daimler), who established the hill record by recording a time of 77.6 seconds for an average speed of 26.15 mph (42.08 km/h). However, at that time hillclimbs were not strictly speed events at all, performances being rated in terms of a formula based on power and cars of 20 hp or more being required to be four-seaters and to carry passengers. There was also the question of whether a particular car would make it up the hill at all. In fact, in these early years, drivers' actual times were not even announced to spectators.
Restrictions on competing cars were dropped from 1913, meaning that specialised racing cars were now eligible to enter Shelsley. Unsurprisingly, climbs immediately became much faster, and on 7 June 1913, Joseph Higginson's Vauxhall 30-98 recorded the best time of the day: 55.2 seconds, more than eight seconds faster than H. C. Holder's mark of 63.4 seconds which had been set just two years before. The First World War intervened and hillclimbing did not resume until July 1920.
Key: R = Course Record.
Times continued to come down, and during the 1920s the emphasis moved firmly away from reliability and onto speed. A new generation of competitors emerged with Count Zborowski of Chitty Bang Bang fame driving a Sunbeam in 1921 and Raymond Mays taking to the hill for the first time in a self tuned Hillman.Basil Davenport was perhaps Shelsley's first "superstar", breaking the hill record four times between 1926 and 1928 in his GN "Spider", but even more significant was the appearance on the hill of Raymond Mays.
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