![]() You just had to get your hands ready for the corner." "Corvettes with power steering had faster steering, but mine had manual steering. ![]() "You shuffled your hands a lot on the wheel," Bolton says. ![]() What the car did not have, however, was power steering, which meant conquering hairpins like the one pictured here took effort. The car also had a rear roll bar and an "aircraft-style" racing harness (recommended but not required for P.H.A. Behind the wheels were drum brakes with center metallic shoes. This was mated to a Borg Warner four-speed manual transmission with a 2.20 first gear and 1-to-1 fourth. That's me smoking all four tires around the corner in that photo."īolton's 1963 Stingray had a 327 cubic-inch (5.35-liter) V8 that produced 360 hp (old rating system) with a Rochester Pneumatic Mechanical Fuel Injection. "Folks would line the sides of roads, especially the corners, and watch us go by. "It really was free family entertainment," he says. Everyone would make money when the racers came to town."īolton isn't exaggerating when he says the whole town came out. It was a boon for the local economy, restaurants, motels, gas stations. "Whole towns would come out: Hershey, Green Mountain, Weatherly, Fleetwood, and Jefferson Hill. "By 1965, there were twelve hill climb races every year just in Pennsylvania." Bolton says. But these races are still nothing like they were during hill climbing's glory days in America, which is exactly what I wanted to talk about with Bolton. Races are still run in Reading, Pennsylvania (search "Pagoda Hill Climb" on YouTube and you'll find plenty of GoPro videos). Nowadays, Hill climbers are lumped in with Sports Car Club of America (S.C.C.A.) rules. Hill climb events still exist in Pennsylvania and around the east coast, but not at the numbers they once did. He ran factory production class with the Stingray and modified class in a Devin Mongoose. Bolton is a tall gentleman with an easy voice who raced in The Pennsylvania Hillclimb Association from 1964 to 1966 and was the association's president in '64. I recently sat down with the former owner and racer of that '63 Stingray, John Sterling Bolton.
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