Film - Sophie Boord (producer), 'A Day at the Rob Roy Hillclimb', 2012

VICTOR SPITERI: What I like about the Rob Roy Hillclimb, it always seems to be a very semi-formal event. And it's also very friendly. A lot of friendly people get here.

NIGEL GRAY: Rob Roy's sacred because it was about the first hillclimb they got going after the war.

PAUL SCHILLING: The oldest upriding hillclimb in Australia, second only to Shelsley Walsh in England in the world. It has a fabulous history, and here we are doing it all again.

TREVOR COLE: First time I drove here was about 1965. And, from then on, off and on, particularly in the last few years.

BRONWYN EDWARDS: This is actually my first race in this car. This is my dad's car and this is my first event and my first race. I love that it's something I can do with my dad and be involved with my brother, and then hopefully maybe my son will do it one day.

 GRAHAM HOINVILLE: I've got two younger sons than Greg, and they're all involved in the sport in different ways. I suppose we're a motorsport family.

NIGEL GRAY: The cars are very interesting. Every car is different.

GRANT KELLY: I like the different nose. A lot of the other Formula Vs have a narrow nose. This one's apparently more aerodynamic and a little bit more unique, and that's what I like about this one.

PAUL SCHILLING: I've got this 500, which is called the 'Falkenberg Jinx'. It was built in Nunawading in 1958. At that stage, it had a 350 Velocette motor in it and little skinny tyres and wheels and things. It's gone through about five owners, and on the way through it's picked up a Kawasaki triple motor, which it's got in here now, out of a 500cc Kawasaki motorbike, which was noticed as a widow maker, and it runs on alcohol, and it's a nasty little beast when it gets going.

DARREN VISSER: The car was made by Leo Bates in 1966. It's probably one of the first that he built, and he's made probably about five or six. Three of 'em still exist today.

MAN: It's a very nice track.

DAVID BELL: The thing about the track is that it appears like it's fairly simple. I mean, there's essentially only sort of two-and-a-half or three corners. Technically, it's in fact extraordinarily difficult and challenging.

JOHN COFFIN: Turn one, which is the one that's up the top there, the first bend, that's known as 'Old Tin Shed Corner', and that is an off-camber corner. You come into the corner and you go out of the corner, and that's how the track goes.

NIGEL GRAY: It's quite a thrill to go around that right-hander with your wheels slipping. Quite a thrill.

PAUL SCHILLING: The faster you go, the more corners there are. They close in on you very quickly, and when you're doing it in, say, under 30 seconds, you've really got to have your wits about you. You're twice over before you start.

DAVID BELL: To put together the perfect run is absolutely satisfying and something that I don't know if I've even yet done although I've probably driven up hundreds of times.

Film - Sophie Boord, 'Harry Firth commentary on early footage of the Rob Roy Hillclimb', 2012

Who am I? (Laughs) Oh, it's hard to say. I'd better get my book and read it out.

Rob Roy was an institution because there weren't many race meetings then and this was like a weekend... get-together with the sporting fraternity, and they could get boozed and carry on and rush up and down the hill, you know, walk around in their fancy gear and that.

It was sort of an introduction to motorsport as far as I was concerned. And I used to go to all the meetings.

This is 1947. First meeting after the war.

That's a homebuilt car.

Now, this is John Barraclough in the NE Magnette.

That's an SS Jaguar. Yeah, a much more exotic car.

But everything's stripped off to make it go faster.

(Speaks indistinctly) These are MGs and things lined up.

That's a Ford V8 Special.

Well, especially as a homebuilt car.

Yeah, you get a whole heap of bits from the disposals or wherever, or it's laying under people's houses. You could put it together and make a car.

And the homebuilt cars were better than the factory ones, 'cause they were purposely built to go up Rob Roy.

And this is a speed car. Now, they would drive these on the speedway, but they decided that they'd run them at Rob Roy. And the strange thing is they beat everyone. So they banned them.

See, where they went up round there... you aim about a yard in over the dirt. By the time you got there, you'd be just on the edge of the track and drifting the car and pointing straight up the hill.

You either got it right or wrong. There was no in-between.

(Speaks indistinctly)

You see? Just look at it, look at it. It was a dirt track.

And you're doing upwards towards 100mph.

And this was later. This is a bitumen track. This was 1950.

And see how the track is a lot better?

This is a typical Rob Roy family gathering. Yeah, the picnic basket, the Esky.

You weren't supposed to drink until after the meeting. But if you weren't competing, they didn't worry about that.

That's Alan Whalley. He was the Lord Mayor of Melbourne. And he liked motorsport.

Now, cars like this were driven on the road.

As long as it had a number plate and a horn and a registration label. That's all what was required. It didn't matter whether they had a body, a loud exhaust or whatever. That's the way it worked.

Now, they'd take all the mud guards and everything off, you see, because it would go faster like that.

And that's Barbara Whalley. Now, no crash hat or anything like that. She drove in this scarf.

The last time I ran there was... I had a very famous MG. It was the fastest MG in the world.

And this American came out here, and I'd take him for a ride around where my house was at 12 o'clock at night, you know, burning around the back streets and everything. You know. And... we headed to Rob Roy. I gave a demonstration run, and broke the class record. So that was the last run I had at Rob Roy in that sort of car.

Film - Sophie Boord, 'Paula Elstrek discusses the Rob Roy Hillclimb', 2012

Hi. My name is Paula Elstrek, and I'm the fastest woman in four wheels. Yeah, I did a lot of local hill climbing. But Rob Roy was a hill climb track that had a great history. One of the events I inquired and they gave me permission to bring my car down. I don't think they thought I was going to break their track record. With hill climbing, they have fastest outright time, and then they always have fastest woman.

Back then, it was like, I hope they have the fastest man of the day, like turn it around, because now, a female holds the track record. But they were really supportive when our family went down there. I had trouble with the car. It had broken welds. They got a farmer down the road to turn up in this old car that looked like that needed to be welded and fixed, not mine.

And people helped me get it ready to actually compete and able to run a couple of extra runs. So that, I think, made it an more special victory. I've driven many different types of motor sport, from go-carting, to sprints, to dirt racing offered, salt lakes with jet cars. But I think the thing about hill climbing is you're racing against yourself really. You need to get everything ready and make that one perfect run.

And it's very easy to make a mistake, and you've lost a couple of tenths of a second. We might have lost a championship because of one corner or leading into one corner. If you want to be a good driver, you need to be a good mechanic and understand your car. The car I was driving, the Piranha was 1,100 cc, GSX motorbike engine, former libra cart. I did a lot of body modifications and just tailored it, I suppose, to suit my driving style and myself.

Then the next step, I was supposed to get more speed, just make the engine bigger and faster, so I did a lot of modifications and worked with an engine developer, and we built a really strong hill climb engine. Your best hill climb engine is something that's really quick, but only for that short distance. So if you did a lap of Bathurst with it, it would blow up and destroy itself. So you want something like a drag engine. Once that was then designed and finished, then I did body modifications.

So I changed the suspension, did different aerodynamics with the body work, just tailored little bits and pieces to suit different tracks too at times. Spending time in that garage, it's like therapy. You've got to get everything right. And if you know about how your car's going to handle, then you've got more chances of succeeding or knowing if something's going to go wrong.

Film - 'The Molina MG Special David Bell discusses his ex-Molina MG Special', 2012

DAVID BELL: The car has had a motor-racing history since about 1950, when it was one of the first privately imported MGs into Australia in about 1937. Most recently owned for about the last 30 years by the Molina family, which were friends of my family.

Lou Molina came out as an early Italian immigrant and the Molina family were known as the spaghetti mafia. They brought pasta to Melbourne and were very successful. Yeah, and so Dad and Lou were very good friends, and I've seen this car competing in racing over many years and an opportunity came up quite recently to acquire it and I was very lucky enough to sell my soul and purchase it.

It epitomizes the typical Australian special racing car where, Australians being the resourceful people that they were in the '40s and '50s, basically got what started off as a road car, and reduced the weight by drilling everything and modifying everything, and making light body shells and shortening the wheel-base, and putting as much power in, and then taking on a lot of the continental cars.

There was so many very successful racing specials and this is, historically, one of those sorts of cars. It's extraordinary-- the performance that it has; and yet it's a car that is extensively a 1937 sort of car, so it's incredible.

Film - Excerpt from 'The History of the Rob Roy HillClimb', Darren Jones (producer) for Penrite Oil Co., 2005

NARRATOR: At the very first meeting on the 1st of February, 1937, there were many notable drivers of the era, including Les Murphy, who'd won the Australian Grand Prix in 1935, driving his P-type MG.

Jack Day was on the racing committee of the RACV at the time, and also, a Light Car Club member. Jack was a real motivator of motorsports, as far back as 1911. He drove his Bugatti with an American V8 engine of that first Rob Roy meeting. Finishing behind Jack Day was Tom Luxton in his Luganda. Tom Luxton actually started the McEwan retail stores throughout Melbourne. And of course, that must've financed his motor racing to a large degree.

-But it was Jack Day who set the fastest time of the day in 1937 at 37.39 seconds. But remember, the road then was unmade.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MAN: Bill Lowe drove  at Rob Roy in that first event, and I've got photographs of him coming up through Tin Shed Corner, and there's great plumes of dust coming from his wheels. It must've been fantastic. Of course, Rob Roy, at the time, was just purely dirt. It wasn't until later that they put pitchmen on the track for the 1938 meeting.

Just prior to the Australian Hillclimb championship in 1938, George Martin, the Light Car Club president at the time, was over in the UK. He was able to entice a couple of internationals to come to the race at that meeting. One of them was Peter Whitehead, who raced at the Bathurst Grand Prix in '38, won there, and then came down here, to Rob Roy to compete.

With Peter Whitehead and Alan Sinclair coming to the meeting, the crowd was fantastic. Documented crowds of several thousand came to the Hillclimb on that day. Two of Peter Whitehead's main competitors were Jack Day and Tim Joshua.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

-Unfortunately, for those two drivers, they had accidents on their second run. Peter Whitehead kept improving on each run. And as he came around skyline, you could see the dust just coming off the wheels under full pressure.

-As kids, we'd been very interested in motorsport, because our father was a member of the Light Car Club and had done several trials. And we've got the English magazines. And I'd realized that Peter Whitehead, who I've been reading about, was coming out. And my father said, OK. Well, I'll take you to Rob Roy Hillclimb, where he's competing this weekend. He was pretty casual about everything. Of course, he wouldn't wear a crash helmet, and he managed to make fastest time of the day.

It was a very impressive sound. I'd never had a noise like it before.

[ENGINE ROARING]

Ted Gray, in the Male Special, introduced a new car to Rob Roy. It had smaller wheels. It was a dirt track type of car. And of course, that's what Rob Roy was at the time, a dirt track. And these guys were able to handle that service so much better than the proper cars. In 1939, The Sun ran an ad that said, expect Hillclimb records to be broken. And that's when Frank Kleinig, called Dirt Track Charlie, came down from Sydney.

To see him on the day, in the Special, which was an MG chassis with this great Hudson motor in it coming around through skyline with the dust flying off his wheels. It must've been fantastic.

-I was a spectator at Rob Roy when Frank Kleinig came down from Sydney in the Hudson special, Kleinig's special. And he had the bonnet off the car, and I just could not believe that a Hudson engine could be so developed. It had four barrel carburetors on it, chromium-plated exhaust pipes going over the top. It had everything that made it go fast-- aluminum head, all heavily finned for cooling. I just could not believe it. And I went back and had a look at my Hudson engine, which looked so sedate, with a single carburetor and a cast iron manifold and an iron head.

I said, I'm going to copy Kleinig, his car.