I love music, photography, and automobile racing. And the three are a perfect mix when you think about it. A well-tuned engine at full song is music to any racing enthusiast’s ear and racecars are also great subjects for photography. Most of them are colorful, artistically-decorated-rolling-billboards for the team’s sponsors, and the bodies of these cars can be classified as moving pieces of sculpture – albeit moving at a very high rate of fuel consumption.
Saturday Roxanne and I attended the 58th running of The 12 Hours of Sebring. If you’re not familiar with this kind of racing, it’s an endurance race. The car that covers the most distance in 12 hours and survives to pass the checkered flag wins the race. It’s a test of endurance for the cars, drivers, pit crews, and the fans as well.
We arrived at the track at around 7:30 in the morning, after spending the night with my cousin who lives a few miles away. We took just enough gear to photograph the race. In the past I’d wake up at 4:00 AM and drive for 2½ hours to beat the crowd to the entry gate. Ah… it’s wonderful to arrive refreshed and relaxed.
Our first stop was the pits, where we watched the cars being prepared to do battle. We grabbed a few pictures, watched the preliminary warm up and then we went to the grid to watch the final preparations. We grabbed some shots of the colorful helmets and watched the flurry of activity as the drivers got “in the zone” for their first stint in the cars. Before they cleared the grid, we retreated to a spectator mound to watch the start of the race.
Getting Ready
The race started on time —it had to, it was being televised— and we watched as the cars roared by at well over 100 MPH. To photograph a car traveling that fast, you pan your camera and track the car in the viewfinder, which keeps the motion of the camera at the same relative speed as the car. When you pan perfectly, the background, slower cars, rotating wheels and tires are a blur, yet you can see every detail on the car, even the driver’s names.
We moved from corner to corner for a few hours, and then decided to stop for lunch. With all the exercise we had walking around the track, we figured we could stand a little cholesterol so we opted for burgers and fries, the lunch of champions –not. And besides the concession where we purchased our feast, although way overpriced, offered an air-conditioned dining room with un-splintered wooden benches. As I sat down to eat my face felt like it was on fire because I’d forgotten to bring the sunscreen. Roxanne said it was glowing a stunning shade of crimson.
After lunch we decided to get artistic with our Lensbaby Composers. We went to the Gallery of Legends where several old racing cars were on display. My jaw almost dropped to the floor when I saw the only Jaguar XJ13 ever built, a beautiful automobile that was originally constructed in 1966 to contest The 24 Hours of LeMans. The car is valued at a mind-boggling 20 million dollars: suitable fodder for the Lensbaby. The representative from Jaguar asked about my lens. When I told him about it, he said, “Maybe you should have left the Lensbaby at home and remembered the sunscreen. I feel your heat.” Well, being slightly absent minded is sometimes the price you pay for your art.
A few hours later we had several hundred photographs on our memory cards and empty stomachs. Next year we’ll be more prepared and pack our own food, but this year we had to rely on trackside concession stands, which are several steps removed from the Golden Arches Supper Club. We stopped at a brightly colored stand and ordered hot dogs, fries, and lemonade. Even though it was iced, the lemonade was lukewarm. The hot dogs looked like they’d been cooked on the exhaust manifold of a pickup truck, and the fries looked like they’d been cooked in recycled transmission fluid. But it was food.
After washing down the trackside gourmet dinner with copious amounts of spring water, we went to the hairpin curve to watch the sunset. When the drivers approach the hairpin at sunset, they’re driving directly into the sun at approximately 160 mph and have to slow down to about 30 mph, which means a heavy application of brakes. The brakes dissipate so much heat, they glow red-hot.
Racing into the sunset!
After the sun sinks below the horizon, there’s not much you can do to take pictures unless you have a powerful flash. Flashing drivers has never been high on my list, so I decided to try the artsy-fartsy approach instead. I set the camera mode dial to B, which keeps the shutter open as long as you hold your finger on the shutter button. The resulting image is known as a time exposure. Typically you shoot a time exposure with your camera on a tripod to get a blur-free image. Instead, I just held the shutter button and panned with the car to get an artistic blur of lights with a hint of the shape of the racecar.
The race was a lot of fun, but we left before the end to avoid the mad rush of 90,000 race fans –some of them significantly inebriated– impatiently waiting to get through one gate. When we got home, we watched the post race festivities on television. The Peugeot team won the race. Today Roxanne and I are in recovery mode – please pass the Aloe.
Cheers,
Doug
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