Ah, the Simola Hillclimb. Ten years of attending, almost consecutively too, save for the one year that nothing short of brain surgery kept me away. Funny, that. You spend so much time around a place that it slowly stops feeling like an event and starts feeling like a chapter of your own story.
I made up for that absence earlier in my career, not as a content creator, but as a motoring journalist and racing driver for the weekend. Back when Renault was headline sponsor, I had the good fortune of piloting a Megane RS up the hill in a very spirited 50-something seconds alongside colleagues and friends. At the time, it felt surreal. Looking back now, it still does.
Over the years, the baton of title sponsor changed hands. Renault. Jaguar. And now Suzuki. But the soul of Simola has always remained intact. The hill still calls to the same people. The same obsessives. The same dreamers. The same slightly unhinged souls who hear an engine bounce off the limiter and smile.
My first proper time filming the hill came in 2017 with Nissan South Africa. Veralda Mazzone, then PR and now a dear friend, invited me to photograph and film a fleet of GT-Rs as they turned that 1.9km ribbon of tar into absolute theatre. Tyres clawing at the surface. Exhausts barking through the forest. Turbos dumping boost between savage gearshifts. It wasn’t just noise. It was violence, rhythm and engineering all rolled into one mechanical symphony.
For a while, Simola felt almost synonymous with the GT-R. My job was simply to capture the madness alongside my friend and colleague Chris Townend of CTP Photography, and later with my close friends from Plan-C, Waldo van der Waal and Hannes Visser. Long days, little sleep, camera bags permanently hanging off shoulders and memory cards filled with moments we knew mattered before we’d even reviewed the footage.
Eventually Nissan stepped away and Suzuki became my new client. The show carried on, just with fewer kilowatts and arguably even more character. Swift hatchbacks dancing up the hill. Jimnys leaning through corners with heroic determination. Hayabusas arriving like guided missiles. Suzuki has always understood something many brands forget: people don’t only fall in love with speed, they fall in love with fun.
When I look back on this decade of Simola, it genuinely stands as one of my proudest contributions to motorsport storytelling. Not merely for the machinery, but for the people behind it all. The drivers. The mechanics. The organisers. The camera crews. The fans standing in the cold morning mist waiting for the first run of the day. And then turning into lobsters by midday as the sun began to cook.
This year was no different. Four vibrant personalities behind the wheel gave my team and I plenty to work with, plenty to laugh about, and plenty to remember. The biggest shift in 2026, interestingly enough, wasn’t on the hill itself, but behind the edit timeline. All fourteen of our videos were cut vertically instead of the traditional widescreen format. A sign of the times, really. Motorsport now lives in Reels and TikTok feeds just as much as it does on television screens.
And maybe that’s okay.
Because whether it’s viewed on a cinema screen, a laptop, or a cracked cellphone while someone waits in traffic, the magic of Simola still finds a way through. The sound. The atmosphere. The people. The hill itself.
Ten years later, it still feels like coming home.