This is going to be a pretty graphics-intensive post, so those of you with slow connections may want to avoid clicking on the “Continue Reading” link…
This is the car that brought us there, in a manner of speaking. My Fiancee’s brother-in-law is driving… You may see this car in a couple of the pictures.
The blur on this shot is something of a fluke… It was bright enough that the shutter speed on most of my other shots was around 1/1000 sec., which pretty much froze things in place. This one I was messing around with changing the aperture and exposure, zooming in as tight as I could, and then moving the camera to compensate for the motion of the cars… This is the only one that came out as anything other than a total blur.
This is the first turn after the initial straight… The cars do a lap with a pace car at the front, then they start racing in earnest. Imagine bumper to bumper traffic at high speeds on a three lane road with no lane markings. And you thought your morning commute was tough.
I spent a couple of races in the stands out by turns 6 and 7, just after the longest straight on the track. There was one guy out there with a radar gun, clocking some of the cars at about 80-90 miles an hour…
Number 13 here took the turn just a bit wide… I didn’t get any good shots of people actually leaving the track, but it happened quite a bit, especially early in the day while people were adjusting to the track conditions. It didn’t matter where you were, in the center of the track or on the sides, you could see the dust cloud that the cars kicked up from anywhere.
Here we see my Fiancee’s brother-in-law trying to pass the “Dead Skunk” on the inside of turn 6… Some of these cars have great names…
I also love the sponsorships.
Possibly the snazziest cars out there were these little racers. My Fiancee’s sister calls them “Na-na” cars because of the high-pitched nasal engine noise, but they’re really quite elegant little gizmos.
I can’t imagine fitting into one of them though… I’m just built at the wrong scale. I’d need to slim down to about two-thirds of my current weight and shrink by about a foot and a half to have any semblance of comfort.