Have two wheels: will race. It doesn't matter what the surface - tar, sand, mud - people have raced across it. Add in something that's near vertical that you might struggle to walk up it and it attracts a different breed of madman.

Hillclimb Madness

It doesn't matter the terrain, if motorcycles can reach it, their owners will race on it: hard mountain enduro, desert rally raids, ice, water - if they could race on the moon, they would.

Motorcycle hillclimbing has long been a popular sport in any country with even the smallest or most remote hill. In Bruce Brown's iconic 1971 movie On Any Sunday, part of the action took place at the Widowmaker Hillclimb in Utah, with all sorts of lunatics trying to make it up a 45° hill. As the commentary says, '..some of the hillclimbers themselves are characters..' In seven years, no-one had made the top, although one guy did when Brown was filming there.

In that film, specialisation has yet to fully take hold - as had, it must be said, any form of safety apparel for the riders! - but fast forward a few decades and things have completely changed, as in so many branches of motorcycle sport. Nowadays, hill climb bikes could have been built by Dr. Frankenstein himself.

The French in particular love their hillclimbing and for one round of the French Hillclimb Championship in 2019, competitors travelled to Arette for an event called The Impossible Climb. It is well-named! The target is to cover a 230m hill which has a soft right curve and jumpy sections.

Some of the bikes are incredible, with massively elongated wheelbases, nitrous injection, single, twin and four-cylinder engines, huge paddles or six-inch bolts through the tyres: it seems that anything goes.

Just because no-one makes it to the top, doesn't mean that it's not entertaining. In fact, it might be because no-one gets to the top that it's so entertaining.

In 2019, no-one made it to the top but this video shows just how hard they try.....and fail!