MG Cyberster vs Rob Roy Hillclimb: Chasing Tesla up the hill

The cars couldn’t be more different. The first was a rear-wheel drive sedan, officially a saloon, with two-tone brown paintwork, running boards, skinny wire wheels, and tyres with a comedic tread pattern.

With a tiny two-piece windscreen and a long bonnet covering an inline 2.5-litre six-cylinder fed by twin SU carburettors and making around 100hp (75kW), it would look right at home parked outside the The Addams Family mansion.

The other was a sleek soft-top convertible with electronically operated scissor doors, massive wheels, all-wheel drive, and digital screens everywhere inside its two-seat interior, plus a pair of electric motors making no less than 375kW of power and 725Nm of torque – enough for a claimed 0-100km/h time of just 3.2 seconds.

The saloon rode on leaf springs – an archaic design now reserved almost exclusivey for load-carrying duties at the rear of utility vehicles – was stopped by four-wheel drum brakes, and equipped with what I discovered was a recalcitrant four-speed manual gearbox without synchromesh, meaning I had to employ certain skills to get it going. Skills which weren’t as developed as I’d thought…

In contrast, the battery-powered convertible required very little skill to pilot, with its modern multi-link rear-end, massive Brembo brakes, and no gearbox to be seen. And its design was fresh as the latest British prime minister.

For those playing along, Car #1 was a 1936 MG SA Saloon.

MG Car Club of Victoria member Rhys Timms generously loaned me the oldest car I’ve ever driven to compete in the Rob Roy Revival hill climb in 2025, when I attempted but failed to obtain an electric MG for the inaugural electric vehicle (EV) class at the famed event in Victoria's Yarra Valley last year.

As far as Motorsport Australia (MA) could say at the time, it was the first MA-sanctioned EV motor racing event in this country.

Car #2, then, is the MG Cyberster roadster we couldn’t get last time.

This year the local MG office made good and shipped its only available car to Melbourne for our return to the Rob Roy Hillclimb after it had been prodded and poked by onlookers at the Everything Electric show in Sydney.

Rob Roy is an oft-overlooked venue steeped (pun intended) in history. It was first run in 1937, when the only other purpose-built hill climbs were the now-iconic Prescott and Shelsley Walsh venues, both in the UK.

Those who’ve competed there include racing royalty such as three-times Formula 1 world champion Jack Brabham, as well Aussie touring car racing legends Lex Davison and Norm Beechey, plus Stan Jones – the father of Australia’s most recent (still!) F1 world champ, Alan Jones.

And now, CarExpert in an MG Cyberster, undeservedly wearing the official No.1 plate on its doors.

If you’re unfamiliar with a hill climb, it’s simple: drive from a standing start up a steep hill, which in Rob Roy’s case is a one-in-three incline, as quickly as possible.

Rob Roy’s sealed course measures 607 metres long in its standard layout, but we’re using the chicane for the 2026 run, adding around 10 metres near the top of the run to help counter increasingly quick machinery.

“The key is getting off the line with minimum wheelspin, right?” said Mike Ellsmore, who has run the Rob Roy hill climb event in his 1957 MGA around 150 times. That means he’s probably completed around 600 runs up Rob Roy, with a personal best time of 25.98 seconds on the short track.

“To get a fast time in a rear-wheel drive car, it’s about getting off the line without wheelspin and getting maximum power down. Normally, it doesn’t happen on the first run because everything is cold.”

The coldest thing on my first run in the Cyberster was my brain.

I arrived for the first run with 350km of range left, having spent Saturday night charging it to 97 per cent (I ran out of patience before reaching 100 per cent) before deftly saving as much charge as I could on my journey of 55-odd kilometres to the event.

So, as much power as possible. I select Super Sport mode on the steering wheel, then go into the menu to activate Launch Control, which needs the ESP and Auto Hold functions switched off. I faff about, and when I think I’ve sorted it, I gun it.

If you’re wondering, the convertible roof is down since it’s a gloriously sunny day and, frankly, it’s the only way to do it.

What a rush. The Cyberster, with not a skerrick of wheelspin, launches hard and I’m looking up the narrow strip of track (Mike is right, the track isn’t so wide!) as I try to position the car in what little room there is to apex the first right-hander, Tin Shed Corner.

Yet the Cyberster’s rapid acceleration sees each piece of road swallowed up so quickly that I end up just clumsily putting the car in the best spot I can as my mind can barely keep up.

As I hang on to the red leather-wrapped steering wheel, the track drops away on corner exit, where the general advice is to stay on that line and not take a traditional wider corner exit, before a sharp rise presents a different challenge.

“The next trick is making sure you’re out wide when you go over the causeway,” Mike explains.

“At the end of the causeway just before the hill starts to go up there’s a concrete pad – the trick is to have your wheel right there; you move to the right-hand side so you’re at the far right-hand side at the bottom of the hill.”

That drop before the sudden rise sees plenty of cars go off, and I don’t want to call MG to tell them we'll return most of the car, but not quite all of it.

Peter Varley, who has a red Cyberster of his own at the event, told me: “The thing you have to worry about here is ripping the front off the car. A lot of people have issues with that part of the track.”

This, of course, wasn’t an issue last time out in the saloon.

For starters, it didn’t have enough grunt to wheelspin, and while travelling at a significantly slower speed you have time to do things like think about driving lines, where to brake, and exiting at the downhill return road, where you’ll probably reach faster speeds…

But there’s no spare time in the Cyberster. Muscle memory is no use at all here: this is a fresh start, a new track, and a different universe. It’s like swapping a World War I Tiger Moth biplane, propeller and all, for the thrust and alacrity of an F35 fighter jet.

I’ve set the Cyberster’s regenerative braking to the lowest of three levels, as I like coasting as an option to wash off speed, sometimes a better move than going for the brake pedal.

I cautiously back off and give the brakes a dab – they’re solid brakes, by the way – before getting back on the throttle to lift the nose up a tad.

It works, and I’m somewhat vindicated when looking at others; a Tesla Model Y storming the layout, with just wind and tyre noise, lets out a massive ‘yelp’ as it hits the rise with speed.

The same goes for the brutally fast Mercedes-AMG GT in one of the other classes, its stunning V8 soundtrack backed by the same sudden cut-through slap as its belly – or at least some part of it – gropes the track.

At this point, I’m thinking 'Good, the car’s in one piece, and on track' but also 'I hope nobody saw my brake lights', even though I know plenty did.

There's no time for paranoia, though, as the Cyberster powers up the long, seemingly never-ending left-hander, never running out of steam.

“You’re looking where you want go, which is at that noodle – do you remember there’s a noodle on turn two?” asked Mike. No, I didn’t. Apparently, Norm Beechey used to drop a wheel off here to maximise his approach, so they installed a noodle there to avoid such shenanigans.

“That allows you to go at full throttle, in my car anyway. After that, not counting the chicane – you just hang on and take normal lines,” Mike adds.

The Cyberster AWD weighs 1985kg (tare) or, as one marshal described it to me, “two tonnes of magnificence!” The only thing heavier was the weight of expectation from wearing that #1 plate, which made me a tad sheepish.

The Cyberster doesn’t feel heavy even on the first run through the chicane, which isn't a curvy esse but a sharply angled left-right-left. I stand on the brakes on the way in, throw it hard left and then the rest feels like a correction, somewhat – before a full-throttle attack on the last two turns ahead of the finish line.

“There’s only really two corners [on the standard layout] but if you talk to Mike Barker, the guy who owns the Formula Libre, and he does 19 seconds [without the chicane], there’s about six corners on the track, right?

“It depends how fast you go how many corners there are!” Mike explains.

It's flat over the line with gritted teeth, conscious not to back off even a millisecond early, and then hard on the anchors to pull up the car before turning left to loop back and off the course.

When I get back, there is feedback. “Top down – nice,” says the SA Saloon owner Rhys, who is running his own MG 4 XPower electric hatch in the event.

Then, as I trundle through the pit area, I hear something I’ve never heard before: “I want your brakes!” from a lady who’d spotted the Cyberster’s red Brembo calipers. Spot that on a sign at a grand prix or footy match…

Well, you can’t have those brakes, because I needed them so much to pull up from full power across the finish line at the end of each run.

There's actually a return road and a fence, and a 90-metre run-off area I didn't need in the Saloon… but used every time in the Cyberster.

The marshals do a wonderful job of allowing you to sort your internal organs out and head back before letting the next competitor up the hill.

But it turns out I messed up.

“You can take at least two seconds off that time,” said Peter, the owner of the red Cyberster, as I popped the scissor door open and stumbled out to catch my breath. Turns out I’d crossed the timing beam, unknowingly starting the timer, before my ‘real’ start.

This resulted in a debut run of 33.75 seconds, way off the quickest time of 29.71 seconds.

“You can go for regularity?” suggests Rhys, referring to the competition type in which you aim to set the most consistent times across your runs, even if they are slow. Maybe he doesn’t think I can drive. Maybe I can’t. But I mean, there’s no clutch, no gears and none of that preamble I had to negotiate in the SA saloon – so there's nothing to it, right?

A bloke called Kitt introduces himself. He has travelled from Canberra to run his Tesla Model 3. “Was that full send?” he asks, telling me his electric sedan has some sort of performance upgrade. “You did didn’t quite get the start, but you were flying at the end.”

The numbers showed he and another Tesla driver were flying higher, who were both at the top of the 17-car EV time sheets. And he was sussing the Cyberster out…

Despite the fluffed start, my still kind-of-respectable time showed the car was in the ballpark, but its driver was not.

As well as the Teslas, the EV contenders included other MGs – such as several MG 4 XPower hot hatches – as well as a Nissan Leaf and a BYD Atto 1. Perhaps the oddest was the Deepal E07 'multi-truck', which turned out to be surprisingly quick.

Petrol-powered entries included custom-made specials like a Mazda RX-4 Coupe, a 454ci V8-powered Holden HX Kingswood station wagon, and loads of MGAs, MGBs, Minis and Subaru WRXs.

Next to the Cyberster was a fantastic MkI Ford Cortina GT, but it felt worlds away: chromed bumpers, a Kent engine and petrol power next to a technical behemoth in the Cyberster. I felt like an imposter next to them, as if I was faking it and they were the real deal.

Eric Erikson (below), who was in the bay across from our Cyberster, ran an MGB with a 4.6-litre Rover V8 under the bonnet, giving its great lines an angrier backing track. It also struggled for traction in the muddy pit area, given the grunt spinning the rear wheels.

Across from that was Greg Manderson’s 1959 MGA (#59), made in Zetland in Sydney, which he bought as his first car in 1976. The patina came from 30 years of sitting in his shed, after he parked it there sometime around 1990.

Yet something stopped him from selling it.

“I’ve had it all that time. I’m pretty attached to it, so I just kept it. Other things kept piling up in the garage, and eventually it was hidden from view, so out of sight, out of mind,” he tells me.

“During COVID my wife sent me on a mission to clean the garage. I pulled the tonneau cover back to have a look inside, and my racing overalls and helmet were still on the driver’s seat.”

That relit the fire. He’s since refreshed it, including the head on the four-cylinder engine which has a 1620cc Morris Major block and a 45mm Weber carb. The Carnation Red paintwork, given the patina, has now been cheekily dubbed ‘Reincarnation Red’ by one of Greg’s mates.

The lineage to the Cyberster may not be obvious – it’s significantly larger than the older MG roadsters, for example, as well as much bigger and heavier, but obviously far more powerful. And they weren’t expensive cars back in the day.

RedBook values a 1972 MGB at $3525, a tad more than a Holden LJ Torana SL manual ($3200), and a fiver less than the $3530 price it lists for a Volkswagen Kombi.

Of course, the Cyberster isn’t cheap at $99,900 before on-roads for the rear-drive variant, and $115,000 plus ORCs for the AWD we’re in, but it’s a bargain compared to the only other electric convertible on sale in Australia, the Maserati GranCabrio Folgore at $475,000…

Our next run up the hill began with a much better start. I ditched the Launch Control because it also requires switching off the stability control, which doesn’t come back on at pace, and I wanted to work on the lines and footwork further along the climb.

I wound up everything by a few per cent: stayed on the loud pedal longer before the first corner, took less of a pause at the whump, and stayed flat-out up the hill for an extra few milliseconds, before holding on through the chicane as the Cyberster seemingly did it on its own.

“What time do you reckon that was?” Peter asked. “A 29.58,” he said. Then Rhys adds: “Quick time!” It seems I have redeemed myself, and the car, at least somewhat.

The general consensus is that anything under 30 seconds is properly quick. My next time was a 29.79 and then late in the afternoon came The Final Run.

Do I finally turn the ESP off? Am I permitted to, under MG’s insurance? Do I care? Should I just go for it? One factor is how much the car slides in the chicane in Super Sport mode, compared to no ESP if I use the Launch Control. A tenth gained here, but a bigger loss elsewhere?

Either way, things are about to get real. I’m weary after an early start, overconfident after the previous runs, and my mind is on the journey home and the prose I’ll have to produce. “One more” are famous last words at events like this. That’s when you make mistakes, and things go wrong.

Despite knowing this, I was determined to go faster, even if only by a hair.

So I push just that little bit extra. The launch is good; there’s even a slip of the rear tyres before the front hoops grab the track, but exactly how fast to take the whump is still a mystery – how far can I take it? Perhaps I can push further and the car will be fine – nobody has competed in a Cyberster here before, so nobody really knows.

The rush is the same – the Cyberster never runs out of shove, constantly building speed when you’re on its endless throttle – but the chicane revealed this was the quickest run yet, as the weight transfer when I threw the car in there became far more apparent than on previous runs.

The time? A 29.46, a personal best. Good enough for second in the regularity contest (in which the worst of your four runs is dropped), and third in the EV class. Damn Teslas. The winner reeled off a best of 27.97 and second place clocked in at 28.78. If only I’d eaten a lighter lunch…

For comparison, my best on the identical layout in the 1936 MG SA Saloon in 2025 was 49.78 – more than 20 seconds slower than the Cyberster over only two-thirds of a kilometre.

The Cyberster’s performance resulted in an MG Car Club of Victoria bronze medal, which is lovely. However, like Michael Collins, who travelled with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in July 1969, I’ve achieved a level of success but perhaps without eternal glory.

Another sign of the Cyberster's true potential was that its 126km/h top speed was the fastest of the day across all categories, knocking off the Teslas.

It’s proof the Cyberster is brutally fast, and very capable at Rob Roy, yet it was also fantastic to drive home in the twilight of a spring evening during daylight savings time, with plenty of charge left in its battery and ample tread remaining on its Pirellis.

And it got me itching to go back, to find those extra tenths I left on the table.

“Hillclimbing’s like golf,” Mike told me. “You go out and try to beat your score last time… you’re trying to beat yourself. It doesn’t matter what you drive, whether it’s a steamroller or whatever, you’re trying to beat your time with the machinery you’ve got.”

Images by Danny Hillyer, Ben Zachariah, Damion Smy and the MG Car Club of Victoria

MORE: Explore the MG Cyberster showroom