My Hillclimb Crash Only Increased My Appreciation for the Sport

It’s been a month since I sent my Honda Civic off course at the Burke Mountain Hillclimb and I’m still too embarrassed to post the helmet cam footage. It’s not dramatic or exciting. I just burned a turn and booked a flight to understeer city where I landed on a rock. I did, however, patch my car up well enough to keep racing and ultimately make the five-hour drive home.

I did my first-ever hillclimb race earlier this summer and it quickly became my favorite flavor of motorsports. For those who aren’t familiar: Hillclimb is exactly what it sounds like. A mountain road is closed off, cars race up it one at a time, and the fastest to do it wins.

My Hillclimb Racing Loadout

• WD-40_® Precision Pen
• Cable ties
• Heavy-duty tape
• Painter’s tape
• Duct tape
• Heavy-duty tarp
• Jack and jackstands
• Standard suitcase-style mechanic’s tool kit
• Assorted ratchet extensions
• Headlamp
• Wheel-changing kit
• Tire inflator gun
• ABC fire extinguisher with metal bracket
• Air horn
• Compliant helmet
• Helmet cam
• Lucky racing shirt

Rules vary based on who’s running the show, but the driver’s experience is kind of like a cross between doing a stage rally and an autocross. Your seat time happens in short sprints, but runs are decently long (at least a couple of minutes). I personally find that perfect—about one to three minutes of full-noise driving punctuated by long but not super-long breaks, and no working corners when it’s not your heat like you do in parking lot racing. And you don’t have to worry about passing or being passed.

The speeds and stakes are pretty high. You’ve got rough, windy roads with short visibility and basically zero runoff. Your reward for a mistake can be a long drop off a cliff or a hard stop into a tree. Reading that back to myself it actually sounds like a pretty dumb activity to do for fun, but of course, facing fears is a big part of the appeal.

Actually, what really hooked me on hillclimb was the social aspect. I started doing events with the New England Hillclimb Association (NEHA) purely because they run races I can get to; I didn’t know anybody there before signing up. And breaking into a new circle of friends can be almost as intimidating as racing a car up a mountain. But this group welcomed me with warmth and patience that I immediately appreciated. I don’t think I encountered a single jerk or unfriendly individual at all. And between bad weather and broken cars, plenty of people had excuses to be grumpy!

At my first race, at a place called Mt. Philo in Vermont, I had to borrow equipment from four different people. I’d brought the wrong kind of fire extinguisher; the guy running tech kindly loaned me a compliant one. I’d failed to bring an air horn; some dude loaned me his backup. Another guy gave me a soap pen to write numbers in my window. A fourth person let me use his spare extinguisher bracket.

I even managed to forget my sleeping bag. So I borrowed my own pit station tarp from my car and burrito’ed myself in it for the worst night of sleep ever.

The vibes, somehow, were still extremely good though. Beyond just loaning tools, people invited me to their fire pits and conversations. I very quickly felt like part of the gang and that’s a real rush when you’re in your mid-30s. It ain’t easy to make friends when you’re middle-aged and work from home.

My times were nothing to be proud of, but if you’d like to ride along at the hillclimb I didn’t crash at this summer, here’s the helmet footage from a few of my Mt. Philo runs:

All this to say, I was keen to come back. When I rocked up to the Burke event a month later, I had the correct fire extinguisher and emergency horn in duplicate. Not only would I not have to borrow them, I had a loaner set in case another newb made the same mistake I had! I even splashed out on a nice hotel room which, honestly, was the best race accessory of all.

Unfortunately, passing tech inspection on the first try and having full night of sleep gave me a little too much confidence and I sent my first hot run a little too hard.

The pace notes said “don’t brake late at Checkpoint 4!” The experienced old heads said “use your first few runs to learn the road.” But when the light went green my right foot said “let’s party,” and what I thought was a small kink in the road was actually a 90-degree left. Where I saw “road” was actually a drop into the forest.

I realized this too late to make the corner, but early enough to guide the car into a rock instead of off and into the leafy abyss. Wiping out at a checkpoint had the upside of getting me assistance immediately. And I was thrilled that my airbags hadn’t popped. Still, sudden deceleration had me feeling a little rattled. The wrecker was on-scene almost immediately and threw a hook around my rear tow point and only had to pull the Honda a few feet back so we could inspect for leaks. The medical team, bless them, comforted me emotionally after seeing I didn’t need physical patching. Of course I felt bad for pausing the race and making the workers scramble, but I was only chided in the gentlest of tones. Mostly, everyone just said things like “happens all the time,” and “I’ve been there myself.”

Lucky me again—the car wasn’t bleeding or significantly bent, and I was able to drive to the next checkpoint to sideline the car until the heat was over.

I brought the car to the bottom of the hill when traffic was clear, and one of my new racer friends let me pull into his campsite to jack the car up and assess. Several others gathered and a bunch of us poked around to determine the extent of the damage. The tech guy re-checked my wheel bearings and underbody, and told me “if you can keep the bumper attached, you can keep running if you want!”

Well heck, I wasn’t about to shirk the opportunity to make a complete timed run.

In a flurry of hands, the boys and I reassembled the Civic’s face with Zip Ties and Gorilla tape. We even got the headlight to look right with silver duct tape. “If ya squint it’s mint,” I said, quite earnestly.

My timed runs were slow—you probably won’t be surprised to learn I was a little gunshy after my wipeout. And I left the next morning instead of participating in the second day of racing.

The car didn’t make any odd noises or behave abnormally the whole way home, though. My KC Flex Era 3 fog lights, which survived the crash with minor scratches, guided me through a torrential rain storm in southern Vermont.

With the car back in my barn, I pulled the face off and started making a list of what was bent and broken. The frame looked OK, but out of an abundance of caution, I limped the car to my local body man for a professional opinion. When I picked the car back up from him, I was very relieved to hear it wasn’t out of spec.

His “you’re good” nod was what I needed to start ordering replacement parts. But in the meantime, I found a cheap bumper and headlight locally, which would be enough to get me back on the road while I waited on shipping for everything else.

Somebody had attempted to paint this Facebook Marketplace bumper and done a pretty mediocre job, which was perfect. I’d really been wanting to attempt spray-paint art in the style of Nick Sawyers and now I had an expendable canvas. Armed with a few wild colors, I hosed the bumper down with the image of a cartoon dinosaur egg in mind. It came out OK for a first try … four colors may have been a bit overly ambitious. But I had fun.

The steel fender, on the other hand, was ugly but not as catastrophically borked. An autocross buddy came over with his heat gun, and he and I were pretty much able to bend the thing back into shape by hand. Unfortunately, it was still covered in residue from the acres of Gorilla tape and duct tape I’d used to hold the bumper in place. Then I remembered my WD-40 Precision Pen I always keep in the car’s glove compartment.

WD-40 Multi-Use Product (AKA The Original WD-40 Formula) is great for clearing off glue and sticky residue from a range of surfaces. Of course, you need to apply it carefully, and you’ll want to test it in an inconspicuous spot for compatibility before going nuts. The Precision Pen makes fine application of the stuff extremely easy—I found it absolutely perfect for erasing thin strands of tape from car paint.

With minimal pressure, letting the chemical and light agitation do the work, I was able to erase the ugly tape glue as though it were pencil markings on paper. That was heavy-duty tape, pretty hastily applied and baked in the sun for days. A little Original WD-40 Formula treatment was all it took to get rid of it entirely.

A little touch-up Honda paint took care of where the black was chipped, and now my wacky dino-egg slothmobile is back in business. I have a few more weeks to make sure everything’s dialed in for the next race … and to decide if I want to get my new-new body panels painted properly or stay silly with them once they arrive.