Race and be Thankful

have been called......

IF only they had turned left at Arrochar - competitors in the 1901 Glasgow Reliability Trials, that is - the Rest and be Thankful would be the oldest established motor-sport location in Britain still in use.

As it was, that particular section of the five-day route 95 years ago went from Helensburgh via Whistlefield Hill, and headed for Tarbet and Crianlarich instead.

However, Edwardian motorists soon realised that the 18th-century military road up Glen Croe was an ideal location for hill climb tests. The first, won by a 60hp Mercedes, was in 1906, and Robert Grieves's book Motoring Memories includes pictures of Arrol-Johnstons, a White steam car, a Berliet and a Humber on the famous hill the following year.

The high-set open cars look antique, the crews are wearing heavy coats, tweed caps and goggles rather than fireproof overalls and crash helmets with built-in intercoms, but the competitive spirit was just as strong then as it will be on June 1, when present-day drivers in the Perth Scottish Rally tackle the old hill once again - although downwards rather than up.

In the Thirties, when the Scottish Rally was first run as the successor event to the old reliability trials, the original road featured regularly. But 18th-century military engineering could not be expected to cope indefinitely with 20th-century traffic, and a new road was built along the current line of the A83.

In 1939 Lord Weir, Alex Frew and A K Stevenson of the RSAC first made the suggestion of using the old road for a full-scale speed hill climb. War intervened, but the idea came to fruition afterwards. The British hill climb championship came to the Rest and be Thankful for the first time in June 1949. All the top men turned up, including Dennis Poore with his 3.8-litre supercharged ex-Grand Prix Alfa Romeo, Sydney Allard driving the Steyr-Allard with air-cooled V8 engine and his usual dodgy front suspension, and Raymond Mays in the most famous of all ERAs - the two-litre Zoller-blown R4D. Mays has been pilloried for his part in the dire story of the V16 BRM, but he was the finest sprint and hill-climb driver of his day, well suited to the only real ``mountain'' climb in Britain.

His ERA had more than 300bhp under the bonnet, and was fitted, like most of the other top hill climb cars in those days before phenomenally wide racing tyres, with twin rear wheels on each side.

Mays recalled that, with its unyielding pre-war suspension, ``such were the bumps on the lower slopes that my ERA frequently left the ground at over 110mph to make long jumps of three times its own length''.

But he won. The Scots were outgunned, the best placed ``native'' driver being Mirrlees Chassels in sixth place overall. Later, the winner's trophy was engraved with the names of drivers like Poore and Ken Wharton, who linked the eras of power and nimbleness as he moved from an ERA to a lightweight V-twin Cooper-JAP.

The Rest and be Thankful was a very hairy hill to tackle at speed. Many drivers had the whites of their knuckles showing as their cars went airborne at the Hump, and braked hard for the unforgiving Stone Bridge.

The surface got no better, and safety features remained non-existent. Tony Marsh's Marsh-BRM catapulted off the track in 1962, and he was lucky that, when it finished upside-down, one end of the car was resting on a wall, with the middle section off the ground, so that, still sitting in his seat, he was relatively unscathed.

By 1969 enough had become enough. However, before the old road lost its track licence, a couple of club events were run there during 1970. In August that year the Glen Croe weather played its final trick. At the final hill climb, in pouring rain very different from the ``fierce rays of the sun'' in 1949, the sports cars and single-seaters were beaten by a spiritedly driven 1328cc Mini-Cooper.

Big Jim Dickson was the last hill climb winner, before the historic road became an occasional rally stage where Scandinavian aces like Hannu Mikkola hurtled through, rather than the racing car preserve where Mays, Poore, Allard, Wharton and other great names made headlines in the past.