NASCAR at Infineon Raceway

Of course we went to the Toyota/Savemart 350 at Infineon Raceway last weekend. I’ve just been too busy with the structure of the page to post anything about it. I had backstage access to the event, which was a lot of fun. And I have 5 hours of video footage that I want to edit into another video as soon as I find the time. But in the meantime, here’s a few pictures from the weekend:

jeff gordon kyle busch samantha sarcinella

Toyota/Savemart 350 Promo

This is a promo video I created for the official Infineon Raceway website. This was fun because I’d never made a fast-paced, high-energy commercial video before. And even though the final result is pretty damn crude and basic I learned a ton.

David Reutimann

David Reutimann testing at Infineon Raceway (with help from Chris Cook). Nice guy on a crazy schedule. I hope he learned something for the race in June.

Daytona

And thus endeth the 50th running of the Daytona 500. I had to watch the race by myself because Vicky is in SoCal visiting her sister and friends right now. Which sucked, but I still had a great time. More importantly, a couple of things were reconfirmed to me today:

• Screw the nay-sayers, screw the snobs. Screw anybody who is trying to make fun of people who watch NASCAR races. This is great entertainment, just as good as any Superbowl or Oscars telecast. 43 cars going 190mph, 2-3 wide, often with less space between them than a deck of cards. Yeah, they’re going around in circles. Yes, it takes a long time and there’s quite a few commercials – but you don’t have to give the race your undivided attention for the entire time. And most importantly, there’s always something going on: cars bumping. Cars spinning out. Big crashes. Big crashes in which the cars slide across the finish line. On their roof.

  On fire.

  I don’t have a problem with the low-tech approach of it all. The cars might not be aerodynamic technological marvels, but compared to your average Formula 1 race, this is pure entertainment – uninterrupted racing action that stays unpredictable until the very end instead of two lead changes during the entire race (which usually happen during pit stops, no less). Who cares if it’s very “All-American” and somewhat Rednecky. It’s FUN.

• I’ve grown way too accustomed to our DVR. Record the race, watch it with time delay, skip through the commercials. Yeah, that’s a great comfort feature, skipping through all those commercials, theoretically gaining some time – but it turns yu into a babysitter for the TV. Way too much attention required, you never feel like you can just walk away from the broadcast for a while. “Oh no, it went to commercials! Quick, gotta skip forward!”
  Well, today I just watched the live broadcast while working on a 3D model on the comptrer. There were a lot of commercials I couldn’t skip. I just didn’t worry about it It’s kinda sad, but figuring out this stupid little fact was liberating.

Looking forward to the rest of the season, and especially the Sears Point race in June. Not only will it be in our backyard, the cars will even turn right from time to time. Take that, nay-sayers!

Inside Nextel Cup

Victoria and I have made a habbit of watching “Inside Nextel Cup” on the Speed channel every week. A little bit to recap the race. But mostly to watch the panel, and more specifically to see Michael Waltrip be his usual crazy self (and to see everybody else’s reactions).

Each week the panel answers a bunch of viewer-submitted questions, most of them kind of dull. So, being my usual self, I wanted to see what it takes to get a question on the program. I submitted one, not tied to a specific race, a few weeks ago – imagine our surprise when it actually came on tonight. Victoria got a kick out of it, and I’m getting a kick out of it. I’m not exactly defining myself by having my questions featured on a TV show (having people play my games and read/watch my stuff is a bit more rewarding), but it was fun to see nonetheless

The question was “Do crew chiefs ever get in the car themselves?” To be honest, I kinda knew the answer, but that wasn’t really important. I just thought that this one would be a good conversation starter. And it was. I uploaded the clip to Youtube, see below!

NASCAR 2007 Video

I bought my Canon digital camcorder for many reasons, but the NASCAR race at Infineon was high on the list of stuff that I wanted to film. So when this year’s Toyota/Savemart 350 came around, I didn’t pull any punches. I visited the racetrack ahead of time to look at the preparations, camped out near my old apartment to film the arrival of the team trucks, hung out at the Speed stage for quite a while and aimed my lense at the garage area for such a long time that I had to sit out the next day because of a really bad sunburn. All in all, I filmed over 5 hours of video, and I had fun doing it.

Because of Lair crunch time and other projects it took me a while to edit all that footage into a movie, but it’s finally done (enough) to show to the world. So I proudly present my first Youtube video! NASCAR at Infineon Raceway – Matt’s documentary montage. I hope you enjoy it

As it naturally is with Youtube, the quality of the clip is very crappy. The source video is 1920×1080, but I had to render out a 320×240 version (which Youtube then compressed the hell out of). I’d post the full video, but can’t really do that for bandwidth reasons. To give you an idea of the quality difference, here’s two still frames of the “real” movie:

I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. Some of the shots are too shaky (and I didn’t bother stabilizing them in post), but I feel that the edit (and how it plays with the music) is professional quality. The camera just happened to be consumer I might do another video at a later point – with 5 hours of raw footage, I wasn’t able to put close to all the shots in this one video that I wanted to use.

Toyota/Savemart 350

Of course Victoria, Michael (her dad) and I went to the NASCAR race this year. In fact, I recorded 5 hours(!) of video from that entire week, waiting to be edited into a mini documentary of the race and what it does to the Sonoma area.

I just haven’t found time yet to really dig into the video – but hey, here is one frame! I’m trying to get back to blogging regularly, there should be more on the race later.

Where’s the bodyguards?

Poor Brian Vickers. He gets his first win, something that every NASCAR driver dreams of, and then the dream turns into a nightmare. He can’t even catch a break on Inside Nextel Cup (which was entertaining to say the least, though). Victoria might disagree, but come on – it’s racing and things happen. Get off your rabid Dale Jr. soapbox. End of story.

The Evil Pit Light

I just don’t get it. Everybody agrees that Kurt Busch got shafted by the pit light abruptly changing to red on Sunday. Not everybody might agree on whether he should have been given some leeway in the ruling or not, but what’s this discussion about how to fix the problem? “You shouldn’t be penalized when you’re committed to pitting! But wait, how do we decide when you’re committed?” – Put a second light further away from the pit entrance! That might work!” – “Etc. pp.

Am I missing something here? Just add a fricking yellow light phase and don’t abruptly go from green to red. Problem solved! Apparently the idea is so successful that they’ll start using it on all the major highways in the country soon. You know, so that you don’t run down 37 at 65mph and get shafted by the traffic light jumping to red when you’re ten feet away. “I’m sorry officer, but what was I supposed to do at that point? You gave me no warning!” I dunno, maybe I’m missing something…

Montoya And NASCAR

Well, this will be interesting. I grew up on Formula 1, and I grew tired of Formula 1 before Montoya even entered the circus. It just became so painfully obvious that in F1, races are never decided on the track – they’re decided in qualifying and on the pits. Nothing against a little pit strategy, but it’s almost like there’s “No Passing!” signs posted along the entire track. Oh, and as soon as two cars touch they fall apart and the drivers are out. Not all that much fun to watch, no?

So to see Montoya get into fulltime stock car racing (and NASCAR in particular) should be fun. Passing aplenty, bumping aplenty. Not enough road courses for my liking, but it sure will be interesting to see how that goes. In the meantime, I will watch the World Cup Final