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Guest Author – Camden Thrasher
While not panning out exactly as I had initially planned, 2012 saw me cover partial seasons of the two premier “endurance” racing series in the US. I use the term endurance a bit loosely as arguments could be made for or against, but I am of course talking about the American Le Mans Series and the Grand-Am Rolex Series. It is in this style of racing is where my passion lies. The variety of car and engine makes, as well as the open atmosphere of the events, is hard to find anywhere else.
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The combination of being based out of the northwest while most of the racing is towards the east meant for lots of boring mile flown this year. At over 2500 miles, The flights from Seattle to various destinations in Florida I took this year are some of the longest flights one can take within the Continental United States. The best food selection I found all year was in the Atlanta airport, while Chicago Midway was the lamest airport of the year. I had the pleasure of exploring a decent list of new (to me anyway) racing circuits. Barber, Bell Isle, Daytona, Mosport, Sebring, VIR, and Watkins Glen were fresh to me while Mid-Ohio, Laguna Seca, Lime Rock, Long Beach, and Road Atlanta were repeats.
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The year started out in Daytona Beach, FL for the annual twice-round-the-clock motor race. It was my first 24 hour race, though I have attended longer races in previous years.
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The place is massive, though not particularly interesting as a road course. This year marked the 50th anniversary and so the organizers brought in a number of the previous winning cars and drivers for display. Many of then still wore the wounds of their fight to victory.
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The 50th Daytona 24 Hours also marked the arrival of some new machinery to the US racing scene. The morning light, partially obscured by the garage buildings, lit up just the front of the new Audi R8 GT as if it was just coming out from hiding and was ready to make itself known.
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Also making its debut at Daytona was the Ferrari 458, perhaps the first Ferrari in a while that would be able to challenge the other GT class competitors.
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The afternoon shift at Daytona was not particularly interesting but the light got better as evening set in and the sun sinks lower. I could start to smell the smoke from the barbecues as the spectators were cooking their dinner and preparing for nightfall.
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The infield section at Daytona was pretty much a giant party from late evening until morning, however I was informed that this year was not as wild as ones gone buy.
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Compared to other over-night races, Daytona has one of the longest night times. However, the floodlights keep it comparatively decently light almost everywhere on the track. Because the light is the same throughout the night, there’s not much point in shooting out on track the whole time as everything will look the same no matter what hour. The night was a good time to do some work in pitlane, as well as a good time to take a break and sort through the images from the first half of the race. As you can see here I managed to make a pretty fierce mess of my workstation.
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From about 1-2am I walked a full lap around the inside of the track grabbing some shots of the Mazdas acting like fireflies. I have to give thanks to the fact that their rotary engines are fairly poor at igniting their fuel within the confines of the engine and seeming turn in to external combustion engines under deceleration. It’s cool to shoot car silhouettes where all the light is provided by the car itself. I was able to commandeer some extra chairs in the media center and fashion a bed (sort of) to grab and hour or two of sleep. Around 4am I took another walk outside, but with just a t-shirt on I was shivering too much allow for stable camera movement, and thus was unsuccessful.
