Pinks All Out

Pinks All Out was filming their 2008 season finale at Infineon Raceway today, and this jet engine car was part of the pre-race entertainment. Really insane. And the video cannot do the volume and air vibration justice. Imagine an F-16 flying right over your head. And then add 100% because chances are, no F-16 jet has ever passed you this close

Yes, I know that the NHRA Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters do the 1/4 mile even faster than this jet car, but they are only half as loud Here’s a few images from the event as well:

[Read more]

Page Gallery Improvements

Whoop! I’ve made some major improvements to the gallery posts on my page. WordPress v2.5 introduced an image gallery that is functional, but a lot of basic functionality is still missing. Once you click on an image, for example, you have no easy way of going back to the parent post. You can hit the Back button on your browser, but what happens if a search engine brought a visitor straight to an image page (as is happening quite often for my Samantha Sarcinella image, for example)? When you’re on that image page there’s also no way to go to the parent post and see the rest of the gallery.

[Read more]

Sonoma IRL Race

As usual, I took lots of video and not a lot of photos. But I found a few pictures from the IndyCar race last weekend that I feel like sharing. It was a great event – attendance was up, there was lots of pre-race entertainment, and people seemed to enjoy themselves. Unfortunately the race itself ended up a bit too boring, because there was only one caution and the field never got bunched up. As a result not a lot of passing was happening, and Helio’s victory was never really challenged (good for him, though – he was ecstatic!). Here’s the pictures. Might have to do a second round later with extracted video frames of actual racing action

Up To Speed

The latest episode of the IRL’s official Up To Speed show is using a bunch of the footage that I shot at Infineon Raceway last week.  Kinda cool, and glad to see my footage find new uses Here’s the Youtube version.

One of the things that I like about the Indy Racing League is that it’s really embracing new media to promote their series. Some of that might come out of necessity – TV coverage and promotion is lacking a bit right now and the league is looking for additional ways to bring coverage to the fans. But in general they are going in the right direction – weekly update shows, streaming qualifying and races, lots of interaction opportunities on the webpage. Other racing leagues are a bit behind this, or overly driven by corporate and outside interests (NASCAR contracts out its own webpage to Turner, for example).

IndyCar Test Session

The Indy Racing League allowed teams another test session at Infineon Raceway yesterday and today, in preparation for next weekend’s race. I had the day off, so I headed down the racetrack to shoot the press conference and some b-roll. Here’s the video I quickly edited together tonight.

Clone Wars IndyCar

This goes out to all the people I know working at the Ranch right now. Taken at Infineon Raceway today, very nice looking car!

This Weekend

NHRA Drag Racing. Looks coolest on Friday night, when the sun is setting and you can see the fire coming from the engines:

Umbrella Girls

Infineon Raceway Timelapse

Testing a WordPress video player. This is a timelapse I recorded at Infineon Raceway when NASCAR was in town last June. The team haulers are lined up on the drag strip, waiting to park in the garage area. This took ~45 minutes in realtime.

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