NASCAR Race

Last panorama shot for a while, I promise! This one is 12405 * 1351 pixels (1.7mb) big. I got hooked on these shots 4 or 5 years ago, when I found that my Canon camera came with a program that automatically stitches these things together for me. And then I promptly forgot about it. Here’s the starting lineup from this week’s race as seen from our (really nice!) seats.

The race was a lot of fun! We got to our seats in record time, 35 minute drive to parking and 25 minutes shuttle to the grand stands. And then we waited. Live races are a weird kind of affair – you don’t mind the initial wait much because there’s enough entertainment around you (this year they had an air show and a mini Chris Isaak concert) and you get to see the cars getting readied. The start of the race gets your blood pumping and you follow the race as best as you can, getting excited about the position changes and crashes.

But after about two hours of racing, the sun, alcohol and constant noise are starting to take its toll (unless your name is Victoria and you just take a 45 minute nap in the midst of it all). The field gets drawn out so much that there’s always a car racing by (making it hard to understand the track commentators), and you kinda lose track of the running order past position 8. But the last 10 laps make up for it as the action gets more intense. Crashes happen more frequently and you get to see if the winner can hold on to his lead. Then you watch the burnout, try to catch a glimpse of victory lane – and attempt to leave the racetrack while keeping your sanity. When 100,000 people leave at the same time there’s bound to be some traffic jams! This year it took us over two hours to get back on the road towards Sonoma. We skipped the long shuttle lines and hiked back to our parking lot instead (getting marginally lost in the process), then needed another 45 minutes to exit the raceway.

Anyway, back to work now, there’s just as much excitement around the office (albeit of a different kind). We recorded the race, gonna finish watching that sometime to see all the stuff we missed. IRL race coming up in August!