Ampus Hillclimb: Reliving the Legendary Var Circuit with Michel Pignard
Some roads keep the memory of every racing car that ever climbed them. Ampus, a small hilltop village in the Var, between Draguignan and the Gorges du Verdon, is one of them. From 1923 to 1986, this stretch of tarmac hosted prototypes, Formula 2 cars and Group 6 machines as part of the European Hill Climb Championship. For our latest video, we hit the road with Michel Pignard, who tackled Ampus nine times in nine different cars between 1971 and 1992. A pilgrimage loaded with emotion, capped off by an unexpected reunion with another Ampus regular: Marcel Tarrès.
Born on two wheels, later a European reference
Like many French hillclimbs, Ampus started as a motorcycle event back in the 1920s. Cars were added later, the war interrupted everything, and the race found its rhythm again from 1965 onward. The real turning point came in 1972, when Ampus joined the European Hill Climb Championship calendar, where it stayed until 1986. To put the level into perspective, the field regularly included the best drivers on the continent — Italians especially, headlined by the relentless Mauro Nesti, multiple European champion and the man to beat for an entire generation of French climbers.
4.3 miles, 377m of elevation... and up to 20,000 spectators
In an era of marathon hillclimbs like Charbonnières, Mont Ventoux or Mont-Dore, which stretched close to 20 km, Ampus's 7 km looked modest on paper. With 377 m of elevation gain and an average 5.5% gradient, the profile stayed fast-flowing — plenty for prototypes to reach 210-220 km/h on the straights. What really built the Ampus legend was in the grandstands: the race drew crowds of up to 20,000 spectators in the 1970s, with as many as 220 entrants on a single edition — numbers worthy of the biggest hillclimb classics, fuelled by an international field chasing European Championship points.
The hamlet: where everything could go wrong
The wildest part of the course is a small hamlet you still drive through today — at a much saner pace than back then. Between the house walls, prototypes used to fly through at 140-150 km/h. Michel Pignard remembers it vividly: during 1978 practice, having just set the fastest time of the field, he carried a touch too much apex speed on the exit and spun sideways, only just catching the car after a hundred-metre slide. A perfect illustration of the whole event: pure driving, with zero margin for error.
Nine years, nine cars: Michel Pignard's Ampus campaigns
- 1971 — Alpine: 23rd overall, 7th in Group 4, in a field of Alpine A110s where only the works Porsches were truly untouchable.
- 1974 — Pygmée: 4th overall — a clear step up, even though it's not a car Michel remembers particularly fondly.
- 1977 — Chevron B36: 5th overall, right behind Mauro Nesti himself — the absolute benchmark of the European Championship at the time.
- 1978 — ex-Stadler F2: entered but unclassified. Fastest time in practice, several seconds clear of the field... then the engine let go just past the hamlet. Classic hillclimb heartbreak: win everything in practice, lose it all on race day.
- 1979 — March: 3rd overall, separated from the top two by just 16 hundredths of a second — painful, especially after topping the timesheets in practice.
- 1980 — Toj: a season that put Michel Pignard up against a certain Yves Courage. The Le Mans native, then racing hillclimbs in a Chevron B36, would go on to found Courage Compétition and become a fixture on the 24 Hours of Le Mans grid. Just more proof that hillclimbing was long the training ground for French endurance racing and sports prototypes — a thread we love following at Live4Racing.
Marcel Tarrès: the win of a lifetime, on crutches
The most powerful moment in the video isn't in the stats — it's the finish-line reunion with Marcel Tarrès. After a brutal accident that left him bedridden for months — 65 days strapped to a hospital bed, followed by a long rehabilitation — everyone thought his career was over. His first race back? A hillclimb. He turned up still on crutches, unable to get out of the car unassisted between runs. And he won it. A pointed answer to everyone who had written him off too soon, and one of the strongest memories of his entire career, which he still recounts with genuine emotion, nearly fifty years on.
1986: the end of an era
Like many historic hillclimbs, Ampus faded out by the late 1980s: a run of rainy editions hurt attendance and revenue, while growing development along the 7 km route — particularly around that famous hamlet — made the event increasingly hard to secure. The last official edition ran in 1986. A revival attempt in 1992-1993 wasn't enough to bring the race back for good.
Back on the road, nearly 50 years on
In the video, Michel Pignard meets Marcel Tarrès right at the finish line. The old landmarks are gone, swallowed by vegetation, but the road itself is still there — plenty of nostalgia, plenty of emotion, and the sheer pleasure of retracing, in words and images, the climb that shaped their youth.
All these stories, archive footage and this drive along the Ampus circuit are waiting for you in our full video on the Live4Racing YouTube channel. If historic hillclimbing and French motorsport heritage are your thing, now's the time to subscribe — more road trips like this one are coming.
And for the images that didn't make the cut for the video — archive photos, behind-the-scenes footage, story clips — head over to our Live4Racing Instagram and the full photo gallery on liveforracing.com.
Tags: hillclimb, Ampus, European Hill Climb Championship, Michel Pignard, Marcel Tarrès, Mauro Nesti, Yves Courage, Var, Draguignan, historic motorsport, Chevron B36