In the mid 1900’s, car manufacturers began to realise a trick. Motor racing with all its competition, glitz and glory seemed to work a charm at helping them sell more road cars. The old motorsport phrase, 'Win on Sunday, sell on Monday' was coined and that adage remains true today. It’s the reason that names like Porsche, Bentley, Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and more remain steeped in racing heritage and lore.
But for one Guy Davies, self-professed, lived-it, breathed-it petrolhead, that adage was turned on its head earlier this year when he drove from Paarl to Knysna, raced the Simola Hillclimb, won his category and then drove it back home. How’s that for a successful road trip?
It really is as simple as that. Except that it isn’t. What makes this story far more remarkable is that Guy Davies, category winner at Simola 2025, is in fact, a paraplegic who completed the famed Knysna Hillclimb in a specially modified 991 Carrera S.
It’s a story that, as with all petrolheads, starts at birth, serendipitously, for Guy was 1963, a year in which a certain Porsche 911 broke cover for the first time. A South African resident of UK descent, Guy was thrown into a world of engines, motorcyles and racing from the day he was born.
"My father collected old cars and motorbikes and enjoyed tinkering with them," recalls Guy.
"He was an absolute car nut. The bug bit from a young age and Guy grew up behind the wheel of anything he could get his hands on."
In 1995, Guy and his family moved to South Africa and made a living doing farming exports of Rooibos tea and all manner of indigenous herbs like Buchu. It was during this venture, whilst loading some bags onto a vehicle that Guy’s back was severely damaged. Having broken his back playing rugby as a teenager, the wires used for the fusion around his ribs snapped and punctured his spinal cord.
At 38 years old and with two young children, Guy’s life was changed forever. He had to discover and adjust to a new life as a paraplegic. His life and business as he knew it, took a different turn.
He used his situation to go from farming to building access consultant, spending months learning and researching about what sort of architectural considerations were needed for wheelchair-bound people to move around freely and easily in buildings. It’s a career that saw Guy working on a number of large-scale projects preceding the FIFA 2010 World Cup, including the Nelson Mandela Bay and Cape Town Stadiums.
Through it all, his passion to drive never really abated. Instead, Guy simply drove modified cars instead. As he put it, “as soon as I got into a car, the playing field was level again". There was a sense of personal freedom in the mobility that driving gave him. He didn’t want to have to wait or rely on others to get to where he was going and adamantly continued to drive, albeit with slightly different controls.
In 2018, Guy’s childhood dream of owning a Porsche was realized. It was a dream he carried with him throughout but after eyeing it for a few months, playing with the specification that he wanted, he bought a brand new 991-series, Lugano Blue Porsche 911 Carrera S.
After seven years of ownership, Guy has notched up over 200,000 kilometres. The mileage is evidence of his love of driving, using his car as a daily driver but also calling on it to entertain him through spirited drives across a number of incredible roads that surround his home. From Bainskloof to Sir Lowry’s Pass, Guy has ensured that his very own Carerra S has lived up to its sportscar name.
A few thousand of those clocked up miles include Guy Davies making his way to Knysna and back for the 2025 Hillclimb, not to attend and spectate but to fully participate. It was never the original plan, but it’s a plan that materialised as a simple course of destiny when a friend and fellow petrol-heart convinced Guy to enter the race, as a driving force of advocacy for people with disabilities. The original pitch was for Guy to race a modified version of Subaru’s legendary Impreza 2000 GT.
“You didn’t need to convince me,” he says. “I jumped at it!”
The man behind the idea was none other than Aivars Priede (pronounced Ivor), Subaru George dealership owner. Aivars’ motivation to do this was in honour of his grandson, who was also disabled and sadly had passed away in 2024.
Aivars was building the car. Guy was to race it and Simola had accepted the entry. All the lights were green …until they weren’t. It was becoming clear as the months drew on, that the Subaru was not going to be ready in time. Guy and Aivars were forced to make a decision – forfeit the 2025 race entry and wait another year for the Subaru to be ready – OR – race on in a different set of wheels. A 911 Carrera S perhaps? That was the solution, and his change on the application was duly and quickly accepted.
Guy made headlines at the 2025 Simola race, making it to the start line as the only disabled entry racing in a stock standard 2018, Porsche 911 Carrera S with road standard Michelin Pilot Cup Sport 2’s fitted. At this point, many had caught wind of Guy’s entry and additional support flooded in from the likes of lubricant OEM Liqui-Moly as well as a few other supporters that came on board to assist Guy in some way.
GT Wraps, a Cape Town based vinyl application outfit designed and applied the wraps transforming Guy’s car into something that almost resembled a heritage Porsche racecar replete with their own helmet-wearing disabled icon. His arrival at the start line was testament to sheer determination, community support, a willing Simola Hillclimb team and of course, a certain flat-six sportscar that was roped in at the last minute to carry the weight of it all. Starting the race was all important, but as another old motorsport saying that goes, “if you want to finish first, first you have to finish". It’s a statement that highlights the crucial importance of reliability, physical and mechanical endurance, and of course, consistency.
Simola is about using the weekend to build confidence in the surface, to allow the grip levels to slowly build and to consistently find more performance as the hours and sessions roll on. Car #62, driven by Guy Davies in the A3 category did this as if he was a master racer. In numbers, it looked like this. From Practice 1 to Practice 2, Guy found 2.44-seconds. From P2 to P3, he found a further 0.77-seconds finish the day on a best time of 55:178-seconds.
From practice to qualifying, Guy did the unthinkable. His second qualifying run saw his stop the clock at 53:872 seconds, another 1,3-seconds faster. But he saved the best for last, as many do at the Simola Hillclimb. His final run during the King of the Hill shootout on Sunday afternoon was spectacular. A mega 51.125-seconds was enough to win Guy Davies 3rd place in the A3 category sharing the podium with BMW M2 Cup European Champion Leyton Fourie, and Paul Munro in a Toyota Supra.
Behind the success of Guy’s exploits, Guy’s son volunteered as the race engineer, albeit remotely. It was he who used all manner of data from Guy’s runs to coach his Dad through each session, looking at where he could improve and where he wasn’t fully exploiting the track. And what a stellar job he did, finding over seven seconds of performance on a sub-60 second lap is mighty.
Most notably, Guy can’t express his gratitude to his wife enough. Guy’s wife has been a tremendous support throughout Guy’s life particularly when his back injury was aggravated but she is also, more recently suffered with leukemia and has been through years of battling this debilitating cancer. He dedicates this triumph at Simola to his wife. "This was a celebration of my wife who has beaten cancer, not once but twice."
These hardships have fortified his belief that all of us need to be more aware of our health and wellness. It is why Guy does what he does, and why he has found a new energy to do more. His aims for the future are indeed, to race a Subaru 2000GT at Simola next year but beyond that, to raise more and more awareness for the disabled. Since then, Guy has found himself involved in the opening of a new skidpan at Killarney Race Circuit as well as competing in regulation rallies.
Of course, there's another star in this story that Guy continues to heap praise upon. Yes, to Aivars Priede, his wife, his son and to his supporters and sponsors at Liqui Moly. But the other star is a certain Porsche 911 Carrera S built in a factory in Zuffenhausen, Stuttgart. Guy wrote this short note to Porsche South Africa because he felt it right.
"Thank you for selling me this incredible car...it has done 200,000km, and I drove it to the event, competed against cars that were trailered to the event, and then drove it home in time to give my daughter a lift to work the next day!" It's really what true sportscars are about and I'd say that not many other cars can do that except for Porsche.
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