CARMAGShootout Day 3 – appreciating past, present and future performance
Performance testing, drag racing and much of the photography in hand, it was time to get to the business of driving again during CARMAGShootout Day 3. After the frustration of roadworks during the previous day, the promise of flowing fast corners and blurred scenery beckoned in the morning… says Kyle Kock.
Heading east on the N1 in the direction of Paarl from the Century City Urban Square Hotel, in the opposite direction of bumper-to-bumper traffic with fully branded vehicles confusing Capetonian bystanders, CARMAGShootout Day 3 was well underway. With much of the traffic heading into work, our office for the day would be in the cabin of the 10 performance vehicles with the scenery of Du Toitskloof to marvel at. The foot of the pass which shares that name was where the very first CAR shootout road trip convoy stopped exactly 14 years ago.
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Here, after a relatively sedate excursion at freeway speed, we would let loose the past, present and future of performance vehicles. Or at least that’s how I’d like to think of the manual gearbox in the homologation special Toyota Yaris GR, the blap blap blap perfect shifts of the Hyundai i30 N and Volkswagen Golf R, and lastly the silent but utterly exhilarating one-gear acceleration of the Audi e-tron GT.
Pies and Steri-Stumpies at Ou Meul bakery in Rawsonville came up pretty quickly, before hooking a left up north toward Ceres. The Simola Hillclimb might have become all the rage in recent years, but the Gydo Pass just outside the Prince Alfred Hamlet is where the King of the Mountain race used to take place and a few sprints up and down allude to why it was the premier hillclimb event. Up at the largest lookout point, we could well have been in 2006 as the Ford Mustang California Special roared its way up from the very foot of Gydo with the sonorous V8 making reverberating through the hills. Pure Bliss.
The motoring gods smiled on the CAR team, even if just for a few days.
Back to Cape Town to meet and greet readers and members of the public.
Words: Kyle Kock
Images: Peet Mocke