Jaryd Belanger and Pierre Julliard headed to Charlotte VT, just outside of Burlington for the annual Vermont Sports Car club’s  (SCCV) event at Mt Philo. This hillclimb is the shortest course of all the New England Events, the run lasting just over a minute it is a true challenge to a driver’s reflexes. The road is smooth but the rolling course unweights the car enough for the wheels to spin at speed if the driver goes fast enough.

Pierre had a big weekend, the car was reprepped at DSG on Friday night after returning from the body shop to have the radiator “slam panel” pulled. Pierre had a small front-ender at Ascutney hillclimb weeks earlier.

The car was aligned by Scot on Friday night, the radiator replaced, intercooler, oil cooler and lower IC pipe all replaced also. Pierre arrived at the venue at about Midnight on Friday night. Jaryd at the same time. Nick and I came up on Saturday to help and photograph the event.

Jaryd had a great drive, breaking out on his first Philo event and enjoying the added power of a new exhaust and tune from DSG’s Matt Koestner on the dyno weeks before. His 2008 WRX sounded much better with the new exhaust (if i can say so as a spectator)

Pierre’s car show no signs of weakness all weekend and was definitely back in the running for a series class win. He was on slicks for the first time this weekend and unfortunately the weather dipped twice into the 28f range, hardly warm enough to make them stick. Despite hard tires he cracked the top 5 in practice on Saturday. Sunday was  a slightly different story. Pierre’s power steering pump broke again after he completed one run in the morning. The pulley sheared off the pump shaft. This seems to be related to the launch limit controller and sudden accelleration of the motor during the secondary rev limit sequence. We’re going to look into an upgraded pump since this is an ongoing issue.  Pierre’s season could not have ended any closer to his competition, Don Taylor who was only 2/10ths of a second from his series title by the end of the day when we left. 5 events and less than a second seperated them! We will see if the time he posted before the pump failure will keep him in the front. It would be an awesome battle in Pierre’s first hillclimb season.

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