Yahoo Finance I’ve Been to the Mountaintop
Rise and fall on a racetrack is the difference between a merely challenging layout and an unforgettable one. Elevation change creates drama by its nature, upsetting a race car in spectacular ways; blind summits and plunging toboggan-sled sections reward bravery and commitment. For the crowd, the sight of a car appearing at full noise, teetering on the edge of flight or trailing sparks into a compression, is oddly physical. You feel the energy of the car, the attitude, the struggle.
This story originally appeared in Volume 19 of Road & Track.
Just outside the town of Bathurst, New South Wales, in eastern Australia, the Mount Panorama circuit embodies these qualities completely. As a bonus, the mainstay competition cars in this part of the world are big, relatively heavy V-8-powered sedans and coupes. Together, the circuit and the cars create a unique set of circumstances. The headline event, the Bathurst 1000, is glorious drama played out over 1000 km in front of a crowd thirsty for intense battle and even thirstier for a party. Legend has it that when the authorities introduced a limit to the amount of alcohol each fan could bring to the Bathurst 1000, some circumvented the restrictions by burying extra supplies in the surrounding hills before the race weekend. Incidentally, the limit is set at 24 cans per person per day. Like I said, thirsty.
Don’t imagine our beer-sodden heroes cutting through barbed-wire fences to stash their loot, though. There’s no need. Mount Panorama is a street circuit. On any given Monday, you can simply drive onto the track and take a slow tour. The speed limit is 37 mph (60 km/h), and it’s a two-way road. There’s no central line, just painted saw-toothed curbs and advertising billboards. This street circuit offers an experience quite unlike any other. The weird abandoned-yet-pristine-racetrack ambience is down to Mount Panorama’s fascinating history. Suffice to say, its founders were as tricky as those beer-burying fans.
Back in the Thirties, government funding for a permanent racetrack wasn’t easy to come by. So Bathurst mayor Martin Griffin instead accessed a Depression-era national employment-relief scheme by creating a road project. Touring the place the local Wiradjuri people know as Wahluu (meaning “to watch over”), he called the road the Mount Panorama Scenic Drive. It opened on March 17, 1938. One month later, the Scenic Drive held its first race. Griffin’s brainchild was a loophole-exploiting masterstroke, combining ingenuity and extreme topography to create one of the world’s truly great racing circuits.
The landmark names are so good, so evocative: the Conrod Straight, Hell Corner, Brock’s Skyline, the Cutting, Frog Hollow, the Dipper. Read them aloud and you instinctively adopt an Australian accent. Mount Panorama has a rawness—a kind of straightforward, no-bullshit, all-action vibe—that matches its hammering big-cube soundtrack. It’s peculiarly and wonderfully Australian.
There’s a sense of untamed lunacy that’s impossible not to love. Watch grainy old footage of Tom Walkinshaw in a screaming TWR Jaguar XJ-S tackling the Mount, Peter Brock bouncing over curbs with an armful of opposite lock in a Holden Commodore, or Mark Skaife in a fire-belching Nissan Skyline GT-R, and the intensity is plain to see. This place has an ugly side too. Pitched battles between police and spectators during the Easter motorcycle races, cars set ablaze in the campsites, and frequent skirmishes plagued Bathurst in the late Seventies and early Eighties. It’s more orderly now, but past lawlessness gives depth to the fascinating lore around Mount Panorama.
Arriving at this sometime battlefield on a quiet Tuesday morning is surreal, the warm air still as can be and the only sounds birdsong and the chatter of insects. To get there, follow Panorama Avenue south from the town of Bathurst for about five minutes, and you’ll stumble across the track. There’s a small museum and gift shop on your left, but you can worry about that later. For now, just keep driving and enter the Scenic Drive on Murray’s Corner, which links the vast, rolling Conrod Straight to the shorter Pit Straight. Turn right, and you’re following in the tire tracks of legends such as Peter Brock, a local hero and unprecedented nine-time winner of the 1000. Pass under a luridly sponsored footbridge, past race control and the pit complex, and you’ll come to the Hell Corner left-hander. This is where the climb begins.
The Mount Panorama circuit is 3.861 miles long, and the difference between its lowest and highest points is 571 feet. It has gradients up to 1:6.13 (13 percent). At the permitted 37 mph, a complete lap takes a leisurely 6 minutes, 16 seconds, and every single moment is a thrill—admittedly not the sort enjoyed by outright lap-record holder Christopher Mies when he flung his Audi R8 LMS Ultra GT3 car around the track in 1:59.29 back in 2018. Yet there’s something strange about rolling onto a public road that’s very clearly just a racetrack. The Scenic Drive doesn’t really lead anywhere except back to the Pit Straight. There are about 40 houses, a winery, a gun club, and a couple of hotels tucked away down small feeder roads, but this is not Casino Square in Monaco. The ultimate blood-and-thunder racetrack is oddly calm for about 90 percent of the year.
So we stop. Over and over again. To look back along the undulating Mountain Straight. To gasp at the closeness of the walls at the steep uphill left-hander called the Cutting. Trying to spot the blind exit at the fearsomely fast Sulman Park. Laughing about a public road having a huge gravel trap lining the outside of McPhillamy Park and imagining pointing any car down the tumbling sequence of Brock’s Skyline, the Esses, and the Dipper. Even if you didn’t know the history, even if you’d never seen a single lap driven in anger at Mount Panorama, the magic of this place jumps right out and slaps you in the face.
My own time there was limited to a single day. Just a photographer and me soaking it up, positioning a Holden Monaro (marketed as the Pontiac GTO in the U.S. but built by Holden in Adelaide, Australia) at various points around the circuit. We sat and ate lunch at Skyline on the hot surface and fantasized about what it must be like to race here. Having done my research, I recounted that Brock won the ’79 race in a Holden Torana A9X by a clear six laps. Six.
Even more incredible was that he pushed like crazy on the very last tour to set a new lap record. This was in the days of high attrition rates and nursing worn cars home at the minimum possible speed. Brock, embodying the spirit of this remarkable track, decided that instead he’d light up the Torana and show everyone that his margin of victory could have been even bigger. It was an outrageous way to further demoralize the opposition, who might as well have been in a different race altogether.
Maybe it was the Brock effect, or perhaps the severe jet lag or the inescapable sense of drama and commitment that’s etched into every turn. I just couldn’t leave without going a little faster than 37 mph. So we packed away the photography equipment and circled around slowly to check for other traffic or pedestrians. The Mount was eerily quiet, as it had been all day. Nothing was said inside the car, just a little nod exchanged. Then I gave that Monaro everything for one glorious, stupid, reckless, unforgettable lap.
I’ll never forget scorching across the top of the mountain and the way the car seemed to free-fall back down, wheels thumping into compressions, the front splitter scratching the surface. The small-block V-8 howling its way up to the limiter as if in tribute to all the racers that had gone before. It was many years ago and, in retrospect, I’d never condone such behavior. But I have no regrets. Mount Panorama deserves respect, and that lap was my way of paying deference. It was scrappy and disjointed, and in the blind sections, I couldn’t take the racing line for fear of oncoming cars. It was just a taste, then.
Yet as it ended, my sense of awe skyrocketed. The challenge Mount Panorama presents to car and driver is off the scale. Aussies have a reputation as straight-talking, nonchalant people with little time for dewy-eyed reverence, but even the hardest-hearted bogan gets poetic when talking about the Mount. And this brief, imperfect experience was enough to know for sure that it justifies the hyperbole.
As I slowed on the Pit Straight, a mild sense of panic flushed up into my cheeks. Speeding is policed with an almost religious fervor in Australia, and let’s just say I got a little lost in the moment. Luckily, a means of escape appeared ahead. Just as Hell Corner turns left, we skulked right onto the adjoining Hinton Road and rolled back into the anonymous safety of Bathurst town, brakes gently smoking and engine fans blowing hard. Time for a cold beer. Preferably one we don’t have to dig up.
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