King of the Hill champion makes history
THE Nissan GT-R remains the fastest supercar of the Simola Hill Climb, as proven by Wilhelm Baard, Reghard Roets – and the R35 Nissan GT-R – last weekend.
Baard repeated his successful 2011 Simola King of the Hill win by shattering the 40-second barrier on the last shootout-run for a time of 39.892 seconds.
It is the first time in the competition’s history that a supercar managed to break this psychological barrier on the mountain road.
Baard was a favourite to win, especially after recording a final qualifying time of 40.099 seconds – faster than any winning GT-R of previous years.
“Towards the end of the day our set-up was optimal and we had a fairly new set of tyres we could fit. I knew if I ran a clean race up the hill we could shatter that 40-second barrier,” Baard said, adding that the speeds on the final run had “scared” him.
Coming a close second was Desmond Gutzeit with his very powerful R32 GT-R.
Each racing class competes against the other for the class win, before the 10 fastest cars across all the classes compete for the King of the Hill (Koth) title.
This year, there were separate Koth races for the standard production supercars and modified supercars.
In the King of the Hill shootout, Gutzeit recorded a time of 40.114 seconds – fast enough for the second spot on the modified supercar podium.
In the class for standard production supercars, Roets completed the shootout in 44.766 seconds, beating his fellow Nissan GT-R racer, Jaki Scheckter, to the top step of the podium.
Scheckter ended the day with a shootout-time of 45.171 seconds on the 1.9km hill climb, earning third position.