There is a road in Bennington County, Vermont, called Skyline Drive. It takes you to the top of Mt. Equinox. The road runs 5.2 miles. You start at 800 feet above sea level, and when you reach the summit, you are 3,848 feet above sea level. The view is spectacular, with vistas at many locations stretching to other states.
But over a weekend in August, there are a group of people who are not taking the time to look at the views on the way to the top. They are concentrating on apexes, terminal speed, and bettering their previous run. They are members of the Vintage Sports Car Club of America, the VSCCA, and they are competing in the Mt. Equinox Hillclimb.
The Equinox Skyline Drive was first opened to the public in 1947; it became a fully paved road in 1953. But that didn’t stop the Sports Car Club of America, in 1950, from asking if they could borrow the mountain for a Hillclimb. The owner of Mt. Equinox, Dr. Joseph Davidson, let them run on a Sunday afternoon.
In 1939, Davidson bought a large piece of land on Mt. Equinox to build a summer home. So the road up the mountain had to be improved. He kept buying and buying land until the whole mountain was his. In 1960, Davidson retired from Union Carbide and built another home called “Windswept” that was set into the mountainside.
Over the years, Davidson started transferring ownership of the mountain in 50-acre parcels to an order of Carthusian Monks. They built a Charter House, in a valley on the mountain, that opened in 1970.
But the Hillclimb continued.
Luminaries of the racing world competed on the hill. Caroll Shelby, Briggs Cunningham and John Fitch raced up the hill in their time. Fitch once comically recalled the steering wheel of his racecar coming off in his hands on one memorable run.
By the ’70s, the SCCA was having a hard time filling the grid, and the insurance prices were becoming a problem; also, many of the cars had become too powerful for Equinox to contain them.
Then, in 1973, the VSCCA stepped in to become the sanctioning body and has been running the annual event ever since.
Equinox is not wheel-to-wheel racing. It’s you and your car against the clock.
You line up at the start, and the flagger starts you on your way, tires smoking.
When you bring your racecar to the starting line at the Toll House, you are 800 feet above sea level. When you finish at the top, you are 3,248 feet above the sea.
You line up while the radio operator checks that everyone is ready. The starter counts you down 3-2-1, then the green flag flies, you drop the hammer, and you are off!
Now it’s you against the mountain.
You start racing through a series of quick sweeping turns; then you come to a hard-right leading into a short straight at First Parking Lot into a hard, uphill left. Now you are really starting to climb. Your foot is on the floor. Then you downshift, keeping it at the redline, going through a series of easy turns and then hard again on right pedal.
You’re over to the right and then back out to the left as you set up for a very long decreasing radius right. Then you are negotiating more serpentine turns, then back on a short straight. From there, it’s a quick downhill left past what is known as Old House, from there you are hard on it again, pushing towards an uphill right hairpin. Foot down hard again as you climb to your next hard left. Then another hard right, lots of gear changes and steering wheel action. Left again past Short Course finish. You have covered three miles, with two and change ahead of you.
In the past, the road to the top was extremely bumpy—like frame cracking bumpy, rim bending bumpy. Over the years, sections of the road had been repaved, but the road past the short course finish was still a mess until this year. A whole new surface has been laid down, and the washboards have been removed from the hairpins. The road now is as smooth as a baby’s bottom.
It is a long run-up to the saddle through a green tunnel. You are wringing everything out of your car. Now up ahead, all you see is the sky, and a bit off to the right, you spy the summit. As you crest the lower portion of the saddle, you know in your heart the road jogs to the left, but you still take it as a leap of faith and blast on up the hill. This is where a number of the competitors will get close to 100 mph. You really appreciate a smooth road at those speeds when it’s nothing but oblivion on either side of you.
At the top of the saddle, your car goes light, then a short straight where you down shift in preparation for a hard, uphill hairpin right. Then it’s a short strait to another hard uphill left. From there, it’s straight to the top.
The checkered flag flies, and you come to the very top and pull in with your fellow competitors who have just done battle with time and Equinox.
If your car has the power and you have the guts and talent, you will become a member of the sub-five-minute club. Some have tried for years and not made it into that elite group. As the saying goes, “there is no replacement for displacement.”
Sometimes small and light do the trick. J.R. Mitchell, in his Lotus, 7 stopped the clock at a blistering 4:47:32. Stefan Vapaa took his Saab Sonett up the hill in 4:52:47.
There was also one big V8 that did the deed. Mike Donick drove his dad’s Allard up Equinox in 4:58:18. “The Barn Find Hunter” Tom Cotter was shaking down his 1964 Corvette after a major rebuild, but he still made a very respectable 5:03:60 another run was sure to put him under 5 minutes.
The Hillclimb attracts all types of machines, with a cut-off date of 1965 being the norm. There is a pop-up car show at the bottom of the hill as drivers wait their turn to take on Equinox. You will find MGs, Lotus, Volvos, A GSM Dart (look it up), Saabs, Aston Martins, Allards, historic pre-war Fords, Jaguars, and Porsches. And the owners are happy to tell you the whole story of their beloved racer.
For those uninitiated, who have not been to the mountain, this is a condensed description of the hill climb by a very fast, seasoned driver. There is no return road, so everyone must wait to come back down together. You are either at the bottom, bullshitting and telling stories with your friends, or you’re all the way at the top, shooting the shit and telling stories with your friends. In the middle, there are five minutes of terror.
But somehow, that terror morphs into heart-pounding fun and gets drivers coming back for more, year after year.
I have been making the trip up to Vermont to watch the Hillclimb for many years… and getting there is half the fun. So, when a friend at Jaguar offered me a brand new F Type R coupe in Tourmaline Brown, I grabbed the keys before they could change their mind. Click here to read more.
