FIA European Drag finals

Good pics! Anyone that hasnt been to a serious drag meet really should go. It puts a chipped diesel or any normal road car into context and recalibrates your brain. After that everything else is slow.

If you really want to bend your perspective on physics stand at Copse when they are running F1 cars, the way they change direction at 190mph is just staggering. Top fuel stuff just can't compare in my eyes.

Have you actually seen it?

Yes both, it's a nice past time. A1 cars are dog slow though.

Good camerawork! I don't know how people manage to track rapidly accelerating things so well - almost no motion blur on the cars. /jealous

Top Fuel cars change direction really quickly sometimes too.

Sometimes from straght ahead to straight up.

Lets see your F1 car do *that* then, eh?

Sometimes from straight ahead to multiple directions at the same time.

i went on Sunday with my father, stood in "the barn" for two runs of the jet car.

i would describe it if i could but it isn't really possible, i filmed it myself but its corrupted somehow, heres one i found on youtube

the booms as he lights up the afterburner vibrate through your whole body, and the atmosphere from the crowd is like nothing else i've experienced.

it was a 4 day event and i think i could have done the whole 4 without feeling bored.

james

Lol nutters. They did a demo run at Rockingham last year (might have been the year before...) down the start/finish straight and I watched from the pit wall, that was bad enough.

I dunno how that guy with the dradlocks does it, even with the ear defenders...

yep, now there was a man who enjoys his job :-)

james

easy tis called multi-shot :) tis what i used to get the pics at brands. my dad's old canon G5 only does 4 at a time and quite slowly so still tricky but his canon 40D can do like 15-30 shots in a row i think within milli seconds of each other!

Heh, yeah, my 350D can do relatively rapid consecutive shots, and with a decent lens getting short exposure times isn't a problem. The clever bit is that the camera is tracking the cars nearly perfectly - the car is in sharp focus, and the background is blurred by motion.

I can track things moving at a steady pace - I'm not great at it, but okish, but trying to track something which is accelerating, or changing directions is incredibly hard.