Archive for the ‘Silverstone’ tag
Favourite Pictures of 2009
I was looking over the photos I took in 2009 and thought it might be nice to add a few of my favourites to a set on Flickr. The ones I chose aren’t necessarily the best shots from the year but the ones that remind of the year just gone. Here’s why I picked the ones I did…
The next two were taken at The Great Escape festival which was a brilliant few days. The first comes from an amazing set by the Canadian band ”Ultimate Power Duo” and really sums up their frenetic energy and I really like the way the lighting has worked. This one was taken at my favourite gigs of the whole festival, a frantic and frankly quite mental set from Juliette Lewis & The New Romantiques. It’s taken from quite near the back of the Concorde2 with a pretty long lens and captures Lewis in a rare moment of relative calm.
The final picture was taken in Arsenal’s fantastic Emirates Stadium and I’ve included it as it was this trip to watch the Gunners knock West Brom out of the Carling Cup that persuaded me to open my wallet and fork over a not inconsiderable sum of money for a season ticket.
Silverstone – VIP Style
Over the weekend the Renault World Series rolled into Silverstone and a friend had luckily secured a couple of VIP passes for Sunday. After going last year we sensibly (really?) decided that we better be on our way out of South London by 7:30 if we got wanted to get there for the first VIP perk of the day – a grid walk at 11:00. We hit the road as planned at half seven and I reckoned we’d be there by ten, half ten at the latest.
It was looking good, until we met the tens of thousands of other race-goers in the traffic jam from hell coming off the M1. Collecively we set the record low for covering 11 miles (about 2 hours 15 minutes). We finally arrived at our dedicated VIP parking area (no parking in fields for us, not today) at about half 12, 2 hours late and nicely timed to miss the grid walk. Not really the best of starts…
On arriving we headed over to the Renault Motorsport Villiage to to grab a drink (more VIP perks) and then we watched most of the Formula Renault 3/5 race from the grandstand overlooking Maggots. While you do get to see the cars flying paste you don’t really get to see much racing. Still, I got some good pictures.
We made sure we were back at VIP central to get in on the second grid walk ahead of the Megane Trophy race. This time we made it and after hanging around behind the pits for ages we were finally shepherded onto the track and and got to watch the grid form and each car be swamped by mechanics. Sadly it was quite a short visit, they said something about “not letting random people wander around the grid when a race starts”. Can’t think why.
Grid walk excitement over, we trekked round to Luffield to watch the rest of the days racing and enjoyed an excellent view of the cars final stages of the circuit.
The Megane Trophy was followed by the Clio Cup before Nigel Mansell took to the track in a Formula Renault 3.5 to show off his skills and do a few donuts. Nice to see Red 5 back at Silverstone. Renault F1, obviously not wanting to be out done, then sent out their 2009 car to do a few laps. No donuts unfortunaltey but it’s so impressive to see how quickly an F1 car changes direction. Oh yeah, and they’re lound, very very loud.
Sadly, we had to call it a day after that. We dropped by the Renault Sport Villiage to grab our free bags of swag and then made for the exit. It only took just over 4 hours to get home, fucking sucked.
So, over 8 hours on the road to see about 5 hours of racing. Still, when you get to spend 10 of those minutes walking down the grid at Silverstone before a race, it’s definitely worth it.
You can see some of my other pictures over on my flickr page.
