Your intrepid panographer checks in from the Laguna Seca racetrack paddock.
Next weekend sees the Monterey Historics with Monterey and Pebble Beach overrun with tourists ogling the million dollar machinery on display and for sale.
The Laguna Seca track is as bad – hour long queues to get in.
The smart money goes to the racetrack the weekend before where all is calm, all the cars are there and twenty visitors turn up. Entrance to everything is free. I’m fortunte that the track is just 100 miles north of home. The mechanics and drivers – many of them retired famous racers – are relaxed, friendly and very accommodating. Until you have seen GP motorbikes or old Formula One cars take the Corkscrew at full chat you have not lived. As great race track corners go, perhaps only the Casino Hairpin in Monaco is more famous.
The paddock contains everything from true amateurs with no budget and one car trailered in to multi-million dollar marketing operations which think nothing of thrashing their pristine $2mm Ferrari Testa Rossas around the track at race speeds.
I took the attached yesterday in the Griot’s tent – more racing Porsches and the like than you could shake a stick at.
And in case you want to know, the sound track is of four great Porsches (aren’t all Porsches great?) – the 904, the 911 turbo, the 935 and the fabulous 956.
Click the image
The sounds come from four tracks and were joined end to end using a fine free application named Audacity.
The mechanics were nice enough to allow me, clunky tripod and pano head and all, into their tent.
One ‘pro’ with a Nikon and a two foot long lens – more boring pix of cars on the track – eyed my strange panorama rig with interest but male pride prevented him from asking what the hell I was doing. Shame – he might have learned something.
What on earth possessed me to sell my pristine 1967 911?
The author’s 1967 911 with girl. I miss the car.
