A fast car, a winding road, some rivals to beat - it doesn't take much to make Thomas Falkiner deliriously happy'What is that," a colleague asked before I headed to Knysna for the Jaguar Simola Hillclimb, "one of those cycling things you're into?""No," I laughed, "it involves a car and a mountain." It's surprising he didn't know what I was talking about because the hillclimb - a race against the clock along an uphill course - can be traced to 1897.It's an antiquated concept but one still capable of thrilling due to its additive simplicity. How addictive? Well after this weekend I would say that the hillclimb is the automotive equivalent of chasing the dragon. Let me explain.Because I'm handy behind a steering wheel, Jaguar decided to enter me (and four other motoring hacks) into this one-of-a-kind competition. I was given overalls. I was given a 177kW XE 25t R-Sport with my own livery. I was told to go as hard as I liked up the 1.9km course when the flag dropped on Saturday morning.And it was awesome; awesome in a way that racing around a track will never be - probably because the odds of destruction are so much higher. Brake too late. Run too wide. Put your wheels on the dirt.These and other errors will send you piling into a cliff or barreling down a mountainside. In a hillclimb there are no second chances, so your concentration is off the chart. Let your mind wander for just one tenth of a second and it's game over.Consequently each run (I had 12 over two days) becomes a life-consuming fixation on finding the perfect line and cheating the clock. It starts with seconds but by the time you get to run No6 you're scraping at milliseconds. Tearing away from the start you adopt the demeanor of a junkie: rejecting reason and taking ever-increasing risk to pursue that euphoric feeling of bettering your last time.When you do the high is short-lived - especially when a rival goes quicker. So the quest of perfection, the buzz that comes with it, gets more desperate.Some drivers crumble. Reality bites. Metal and fibreglass deform against tyre walls, embankments. The cameraphones come out. Yet harder I charge.Fighting that human instinct of self-preservation, I use every millimeter of the blacktop to move my XE higher up the timing sheet. Braking is kept to a terrifying minimum. Apexes are clipped tight and true. Changes in direction are as smooth and fluid as possible.Crossing the finish line I know I've done good: 52.6 seconds, a personal best and quick enough to embarrass some more performance-orientated machinery. Unfortunately it isn't quick enough to win the Media Challenge. Ashley Oldfield finds five-tenths of a second to go home with the trophy.There are no second chances in the Jaguar Simola Hillclimb. I know I can go that little bit faster, I know I can. But the hits have run out and instead I'm left craving the heady kick of putting this knowledge to use. The dragon chasing will have to wait until next year. I hope I can survive the cold turkey...