Jason Schumer was hard into his second run at the 2018 Empire Hill Climb, pointed toward turn 3 in his 1995 Nissan 240SX, when he got something wrong. Maybe he lifted too abruptly. Maybe Schumer gave an errant tug at his hydraulic handbrake or maybe he went in too hot. The 240SX—built as a drift car and converted to look like a home-market Silvia—pirouetted a full 360 and then maybe 110 degrees more.
It hit nothing. One three-point turn later, Schumer was headed back through turn 3 and up the hill, and if his second run took twice as long as the others, the video producer, car builder and general jack-of-all-trades from Pittsfield Township, Michigan, nonetheless managed to complete all six runs. The spectators at Empire, maybe in the thousands, audibly expressed appreciation.
At the edge of the woods along Wilco Road, with a multitude of distinct exhaust notes bouncing between trees roughly two-thirds of a mile from the Lake Michigan shoreline on a warm September day, the 2018 Empire Hill Climb felt a lot like a stage in Rally Finland—only less remote, with fewer insects (trust us on the insects). Better still, with a low-level competition license, a four-point roll bar and $95, you, too, could compete at Empire, in just about anything you chose to drive.
There are no crowd-control whistles at this six-turn hill climb measuring somewhere between one-half and three-quarters of a mile in length. No grumpy guys in yellow shirts telling people where they have to go. There aren’t a lot of places where you can watch drift cars, NASCAR tube frames, Miata Cup roadsters, front-drive rally cars and a Pikes Peak record-holder prepped by a tier-one professional outfit with backing from one of the world’s largest automakers duke it out up the same hill on the same Saturday. Nor where you can enter your 45-year-old AMC Gremlin against the fastest driver to the clouds, just to find out what you can do.
Jordan Easter grew up in northwestern Alabama near the Mississippi state line and attended high school not too far from Talladega. She was a graduate engineering student at the University of Michigan, hiking with friends on federal land along the Empire Bluff Trail in late summer 2014, when she heard the siren song of a loud engine. When she hurried to the edge of the woods and peered down an embankment, she saw a lone Datsun 510 screaming up what appeared to be a closed road.
Easter had stumbled on the first running of the resurrected Empire Hill Climb. In the figurative sense, she’d taken her
first puff.
“We had Nissans when I was a kid—sort of the family favorite—but I’d never actually seen a 510 before,” she said. “We had dune buggies, and I had an inclination toward the mechanical, but I’d never seen anything like that hill climb. I thought, ‘People actually build cars to do this? I can do this?’ It was definitely the start of a journey.”
Tung had more driving experience. He’s a seasoned drifter and makes his living as a development engineer at GM’s Milford proving grounds. He ended the day fifth in high-power Class 3—the largest in the meet. Easter had run a single autocross before Empire. Her times were uneven, but she shaved more than two seconds from her first run to her sixth and finished sixth among eight entrants in Vintage.
Easter has scheduled her first two track days before this season ends. She’ll definitely be back at Empire in 2019, she said, but not before a serious refresh and engine swap for her Z this winter.
The Empire Hill Climb is a bucolic impressionist painting of everything that brought us to cars to begin with: the variety, the horsepower, the communion and camaraderie, the spectacle and the history, all brushed effusively with the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. So why not?
The original Empire Hill Climb didn’t end due to a lack of participants or visitors. It ended because the organizers had had enough of the thing. Mike Taghon was involved through the original’s run from 1964 through 1980, for several years as event chairman. Now 80, Taghon remains a car guy at heart. His family has run modifieds at local short tracks for decades, collecting a handful of track championships at recently defunct Cherry Raceway, south of Traverse City, Mich., along the way.
Yet his affinity for cars had little to do with his role in the original hill climb. As the third-generation family owner of Taghon’s Garage LLC—Empire’s repair and tow shop—he’d always been involved in civic activities.
The first hill climb was launched by local Lions Clubs and an SCCA-affiliated car club in Traverse City. It was a highlight on the civic calendar in the village of Empire, Mich. (population 376), and popular from the start, filling the town with visitors from Friday afternoon through the following Sunday morning.
The hill climb rarely missed its entry cap of 60 cars, according to Taghon. Demand was strong enough that it was staged twice a summer for a handful of years. The Lions charged a nominal admission and ran the concessions, and there was always midway space with carnival rides. The original start was 600-800 feet farther northwest on Wilco Road from the current gate—now square in a recently built cluster of homes. The spectator area was on the opposite side of Wilco, and organizers used tractors and hay carts to ferry people up the hill. Competitors weren’t required to wait after runs and convoy back down the hill. They simply kept going up Wilco to the state highway and drove back into town.
And then, almost as quickly as it sprouted, the original Empire Hill Climb ended.
“The Lions made some good money on admissions and concessions and used it for some good things,” Taghon remembered. “But I think, frankly, people got tired of putting in the work. I myself had gotten what we now call burned out, so I resigned the chairmanship. After one more year, when no one wanted to take the job, they shut it down.”
Memories of hill climbs past don’t fade easily, especially when they’re acquired as children. For decades, a cluster of car folk in northern lower Michigan threatened to try to revive the Empire Hill Climb in some fashion. Finally, 33 years after the last running of the first, a fellow named Mike Kelty headed south from Northport at the northwest edge of Grand Traverse Bay and started banging on doors (The first time Kelty started his just-reassembled Porsche 944 Turbo this summer, he drove it south to run the hill climb). Fortunately, Kelty found the right person for the job.
Unlikely, maybe, but definitely the right one. Paul Skinner is a 62-year-old Englishman from Yorkshire who spent 20 years navigating in rallies around the U.K. before moving to Michigan in 1997. He moved because that’s where his bride—a childhood acquaintance whom Skinner hadn’t seen in 25 years when their romance ignited—made her home.
Part of the prenup plan had Skinner giving up rallying, and he was fine with that. Instead, he focused on The Miser’s Hoard, his gift and interior décor shop on Front Street in the center of Empire. He sat on and later chaired the local planning commission, then started a 10-year run as president of the Empire Chamber of Commerce.
Meantime, he got his car fix driving his vintage Rothmans-liveried Ford Escort RS rally car around the pinky of Michigan’s mitten and watching national rallies staged in the northern wilds.
“So Mike (Kelty’s) father used to do this event back in the day, and he came to see me six years ago, wanting to resurrect the hill climb, and I really liked the idea,” Skinner said. “I’ve organized the Empire Asparagus Festival and the Empire Hops Festival, so I have experience doing events—and obviously an affinity toward motorsport—and I saw the potential. It wasn’t too difficult for me to go in front of the village council with some level of trust and credibility and say, ‘This is a good thing for the town.’”
With go-ahead from the village, Skinner jumped through the necessary hoops, obtained the necessary approvals (including from the federal government) and had the new Empire Hill Climb ready to roll in September 2014. There were 13 entrants the first year (including that Datsun 510), 18 the second and 20 the third. In 2017, 27 cars ran up the hill. This year, there were 52 applicants for 40 spots.
“We’ve grown because we’ve proven we can properly run a fun event, with a crazy mix of cars on the same hill, same conditions and not be cost prohibitive,” Skinner said. “And this year, we got a huge impetus from Autoweek, and hundreds of thousands of magazine and Facebook subscribers who’ve seen posts about this hill climb. It’s been huge in spreading the word, from both the spectating and competing points of view.”
Wherever the new Empire Hill Climb goes from here, one thing is certain: The former longtime chairman approves.
“It’s very different from our other festivals now and, in certain respects, still behind,” said Mike Taghon. “They’re doing a great job, good all the way around, and they’re catching up fast. I’m just not sure why they don’t charge admission. It would generate some good cash.”
It’s hard to say which was the most unusual car at Empire this year, but it’s not too difficult narrowing it down. The diversity of entrants was striking—from a ’94 Saturn SL2 purchased for $500 and entered by two drivers, a la 24 Hours of Lemons, to a cherry ’64 Porsche 356 SC (yep, Dave Burton raced it up the hill), to RealTime Racing’s purpose-tuned, Pikes Peak-winning Acura TLX GT. Yet Saturday morning before the climb, the overriding theme along Front Street in parc exposé—the race paddock, in American—was equally obvious. Optimism.
We should be fast, right? The question repeated as competitors chatted among themselves and spectators. Our power-to-weight is pretty good. This hill suits front-drive. Our tires are less heat-dependent than others…As it is with MLB teams in Arizona and Florida, when March is green and horizons are boundless, nearly every competitor in Empire was thinking they could reach the class podium.
There’s a good chance the most unusual car was FrankenCarlo. Built at a metal shop in Holland, Mich., FrankenCarlo started life as an ASA short-track racer before being widened and fitted with a mostly steel body and an oddly aggressive, high-downforce aero package, then finished for no obvious reason with “Lyn St. James” on the rear bumper.
It was entered in Class 3 (essentially unlimited), powered by a full-tune NASCAR V8 (likely 650-700 hp) and driven by Eric Burmeister—an experienced rally guy who’d previously run the hill in a rally-prepped Mazda 3.
Before the first run, with FrankenCarlo weighing in a hair under 3,000 pounds, Burmeister wasn’t worried about his power-to-weight ratio. He was concerned about his tires. The car was fitted with Hoosier pavement slicks, and there didn’t seem much chance they’d achieve any kind of proper operating temperature over the course of six runs.
“Wish we had dirt tires,” Burmeister mused. “They don’t need much heat to stick.” Or maybe tire warmers.
Burmeister was sweating nicely when he finished his final run, looking a bit drained.
“Not exactly fun, but it was a challenge,” he said. He’d managed a best of only 25.865—on par with the slower cars in Class 1, slower than his time in his Mazda 3 the year before.
“We can say (FrankenCarlo) didn’t like it much here,” Burmeister concluded. “But I’m glad I tried it. Better than easy.”
Or maybe the most unusual car was an actual Monte Carlo—if you can call a NASCAR template body an actual Monte Carlo. This would be an early 2000s Busch series car once owned and campaigned by the Bodine family, brought to Empire by Jim Szilagyi from Morgantown, Kentucky, where he’s product director at Holley Performance. Szilagyi had recently finished refreshing his Busch car and tried it on the road course at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., so he was “certain it can turn right.”
But maybe not willingly, not on a short uphill run. In the event, Szilagyi’s NASCAR dealt with similar issues as FrankenCarlo—and at 3,400-plus pounds with a Chevy LS crate motor making about 400 hp, a substantially lower power-to-weight. The Busch car’s best was eight-tenths slower than FrankenCarlo’s.
“I definitely learned something,” Szilagyi said afterward. “That I brought the wrong tool for the job.”
Then again, maybe the most unusual entrant was a ’94 Honda Civic hatchback, built and driven by Cody Loveland of Cody Loveland Racing in nearby Buckley, Mich. Loveland has already undertaken a handful of good runs up Pikes Peak, and he’s garnered at least a bit of fame thanks to a viral YouTube video of his fiery crash in a Chevy-powered Acura NSX there in 2013. He built the Civic with the intent of establishing a front-drive record to the clouds and brought it to Empire to start shaking it down.
Loveland’s Civic was cleaned out to the metal, as you’d expect, and hauling just 2,400 pounds. What’s unusual was the turbocharged Honda V6 poking through a cutout in its hood—“355 hp at the wheels,” according to Loveland—and the milewide tires and an aero package that makes a winged sprint car look tame.
Loveland had a conservative 24.808 his first run. One was enough to demonstrate that he had lots of power and tons of downforce, but not nearly enough clutch to match. That was basically toast, and Loveland’s hill climb was finished.
Nonetheless, Loveland left Empire pleased with what he’d learned, still focused on his dream of a front-drive record at Pikes and on an even bigger, more abiding dream: a serial-built hypercar called the Enviate, which he describes as “the fastest car ever attempted by the common man.” The prototype looks something like an LMP car. His target is a 2,000-pound dry weight, 7,200 pounds of downforce and 1,200 hp from a twin-turbo LSX-based billet engine. Crazy power-to-weight, but power-to-weight doesn’t always matter most.
Peter Cunningham had tire warmers. You don’t win upward of 100 races and 18 professional championships without being prepared, even when you show up mostly for grins. Cunningham’s RealTime Racing team came to Empire from its shop north of Milwaukee with an engineer and a downsized but fully equipped track crew.
It came at Autoweek’s invitation—and because it could. Saturday morning, as his crew checked tire temps and gently warmed his Acura TLX GT on jack stands, all-wheel drive engaged, Cunningham paced. He seemed cautious, respectful. Maybe he tried to tamp expectations. “It usually comes down to power-to-weight,” he said, before he’d driven up the hill, much less raced up. “There could be cars here with better power-to-weight than ours.” Given roughly 550 hp and 3,200 pounds in his TLX, he was probably right.
Cunningham was clearly the celebrity on Front Street, but he behaved like a regular guy. He smiled, watched patiently as competitors leaned into and underneath his TLX. He had plenty of time for questions and for fans with posters to sign.
“I didn’t get a chance to meet every competitor, but we had a lot of interactions,” Cunningham told Autoweek after Empire. “It was just a couple racers chatting it up. I didn’t feel like we were different from anybody else there, other than that our spaceship was kind of prepped to a different level. Nobody seemed resentful of that, either.”
His blue and orange spaceship was originally developed by RealTime and Honda Performance Development for the 2014 Pirelli World Challenge season—before World Challenge began phasing toward international FIA GT rules. The TLX ran through ’14, ’15 and ’16 (when World Challenge made RealTime ditch its all-wheel drive), racing Bentleys, Cadillacs, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens, and Porsches and winning three races along the way. For 2017, World Challenge’s top-rung series switched to straight GT3 rules and Acura to its new NSX. That left a perfectly good TLX race car with nowhere to run.
At least until RealTime and HPD decided to fiddle a bit with the TLX, reinstall the AWD and race to the clouds. Cunningham went to Colorado in June 2017 and managed 9:33.797 his first time up Pikes Peak, taking first place in the Open class and second overall behind Romain Dumas in a purpose-built, Unlimited-class Norma MXX RD. Cunningham was Rookie of the Year at age 55. Last June, he went back with the TLX and set an Open class record of 9:27.352—third overall, again behind Dumas in the electric VW I.D. R, and Simone Faggioli in the Norma Dumas had run the previous year. A few months later, he pulled the TLX to Empire.
Cunningham went to put on a show, and he absolutely did, even if the turning radius of his TLX was such that he needed a push from his crew and a three-pointer just to get into the starting gate. Entered in Empire’s Exhibition class (like Autoweek’s Miata Cup car), Cunningham and the TLX ran 21.426 his first, exploratory trek up the hill—quicker than all but a handful of runs all day, including the first three by Empire veteran and 2018 winner Dan Milewski in his Corvette Z06. By his fourth run, Cunningham hit 18.539—more than two seconds below the previous record—and still seemed to be getting faster.
Then, as Jason Schumer had done earlier in his 240SX drift car and as racers everywhere do, trying to build a gap or close one or just improve the show, Cunningham dug a little deeper and squeezed his TLX a little harder, then hit trouble and ended his day. “That fifth run was going to be 17-something,” Cunningham said. “I had a good feeling about it. I’m pretty sure I hit some gravel … I hit that and rolled right off the road.
“It could have been a lot worse. It drew some extra attention since we put the photo and the video on social media. People have been eating it up, so I think it was good press.”
Cunningham left Empire feeling good. “The comparison I have, having done only two hill climbs, is with Pikes Peak,” Cunningham said. “I was half-joking when I said I like Empire better because you don’t have to get up at 2:30 in the morning and Empire is all over in one day, whereas at Pikes Peak, if you do all the pre-event testing, you’re kind of there for the month of June. This was just a fun deal—glad we came.”
Another potential winner of the most-unusual-car-at-Empire award: Ian Dawkins’ 1973 AMC Gremlin.
Dawkins found his Gremlin in 2002 decaying in the northern Michigan woods. He found its rare AMC 401 V8 in a half-buried Jeep at a scrapyard in Defiance, Ohio, and rebuilt it with a 750-cfm four-barrel to deliver 400 hp. The Gremlin’s front brakes come from a Chevy Caprice, its steering box from a ’65 Pontiac GTO and its 4.10 rear end from a Ford Explorer. It has old-school traction bars to manage rear-axle hop, and Dawkins thinks it looks better without the hood.
Dawkins won the Vintage class at Empire in 2017, and he had a good, smooth first run this year. Except he immediately realized his front brakes weren’t balanced. Then, as he waited in the queue for his second run, hammering at the Gremlin’s master cylinder (“Obviously I’m not a very good brake engineer,” he observed), Dawkins noticed that the oil pressure in his prized 401 was low. Rather than risk disaster, he shut it down. And after the other seven Vintage entrants had finished their six runs, Dawkins’ lone blast up Empire was still good enough for a medal for third.
He didn’t seem angry about his short day. Back in town, he enjoyed the attention his Gremlin collected, and he gladly answered the questions. At one point, he choked up a second.
“I’m just so glad this thing is going again,” Dawkins said. “My dad had some good runs in the original climb, and it used to be so great hearing him talk about it … I wish he was here to tell you.
“This deal has shaped up as a worthy successor. I hope it stays that way.”
At the southern tip of the viewing area, past the pizza trailer and behind one of the support vehicles, a group of not-too-far-past-high-school guys had gathered to watch the proceedings. They knew nearly all the cars by make and rough vintage, commenting on each after it screamed past with the unwavering authority only a 21-year-old can muster. There aren’t enough car things around here, they said.
Corbin Wojey gleefully showed pictures of his Mitsubishi Evo 8 back home in Mancelona. Arthur Antonov owned the BMW 335i they’d driven to Empire. Isaac Rose explained how he’s getting upward of 310 hp from the 2.0T in his Audi A4. He wondered what it would take to put a cage in and how it might cramp his style the rest of the time. He thought he might want to enter next year.
Don’t drag your feet, Isaac. The 40-entrant limit is a hard cap, according to Skinner, and given the hill climb’s permits, time restrictions and volunteer staff, it isn’t likely to change anytime soon. One possibility going forward might be a Friday night session (no surprise from an organizer who, as a co-driver, always liked night rallies best). Meantime, there might be up to five Exhibition spots for rock stars and a minimum 35 for the rest of us.
There’s not likely to be an admission charge. Entry fees and sponsorship cover the cost of staging the hill climb, Skinner said; the gravy comes from benefits for the local chamber. That’s not easy to measure in a town of 400, but Empire’s only hotel was booked solid for the weekend. So were local rental cottages, and rooms were hard to come by generally within 25-30 miles. Skinner said receipts at his art shop were up 50 percent for the hill climb compared to the Saturdays before and after.
Registration starts in June for 2019, so head for the hill. Watch it or try it out, as Isaac Rose hopes to. You could be the next P.D. Cunningham. If not, you might not care—you’ll have a blast either way.
The Empire Hill Climb is one of hundreds of similar events around the country, sanctioned by the SCCA or some other responsible motorsport authority for safety, fairness and an official air. But really, they are grassroots undertakings organized, managed and attended by regular car folk who look forward to weekends in the woods or at a track, watching and driving all types of cars, trucks and motorcycles.
You want to know why Autoweek has planted its flag at Empire? Because of its history, its truly unique mix of entrants and its ease of access for both spectators and competitors, all tucked into a gorgeous corner of our home state with lots of other stuff to do. Because to support our mission as a chronicler of all things good (and sometimes bad) about cars, we need to be where passion and appreciation meet community, where the interest in emotional machines and motorsport sparks, grows and maybe turns into a hobby. Or a career.
Why the hell not?
Mike Pryson, Autoweek motorsports editor, contributed to this story.
This story originally appeared in the October 22 issue of Autoweek. Subscribe here.