Banger Racing and the World Dirt Final
Forget all your corporate hospitality, helicopter transfers, Pimms and Champagne and traffic jam nonsense up at Silverstone today. The real racing was in a field just off the M23 near Gatwick Airport. There you'll find Smallfield Raceway, a mecca for proper motorsport enthusiasts with proper cars and proper budgets (i.e. £0.00). Smallfield was my location for today, with one of its numerous banger racing meetings (next one July 31st) being held in a beautifully prepared cow-pat splattered field with complete with obligatory bacon butty van. All pics shot in this post with a Leica M9 and Zeiss 2/50, and all the colour ones in the full gallery are with a Canon 1DIV whilst all the mono ones are with the M9.
Rather than just going over and taking pictures, I decided to follow one of the competitors, and I had the pleasure of the company of a young chap called Matt Covey for the day. Aged 16, and racing from the age of 9, Matt has form and, with his dad Jon being an ex world banger racing champion, he's got some good mentoring as well. Today's racing was team-based for the youngsters, with Matt and a few pals driving in the curiously-named Mr Men team.
Matt had two cars which he reliably informed me are Nissan Micras (the origin of the vehicles in this category of motorsport involves a significant amount of guesswork). It looked like one of them was a round-shaped one, and the other an older more angular mark 1 model. Matt races in the Kids category which is up to 1000cc cars and ages from 10-16 which is "non contact" (using the term lightly), and also the Kids Rookies category which is up to 1300cc cars and 12-16 year olds, and involves something called "nudge and spin". This appears to mean that you can nudge someone out of the way and spin them round, but "following up" is outlawed. I took this to mean that if there's someone sitting stationary you can't ram them like you can in the higher classes.
Car preparation seems to involve welding and/or bolting the doors shut, all interior, glass, lights etc stripped out, a roll cage, small petrol tank in the centre of the passenger compartment, and a bonnet bolted down. Engines looked a bit modified, with some radiators at the back of the engine bay to avoid getting smashed, and not many exhausts in evidence either. Most cars were front wheel drive so had chunky tyres on the front, and "normal" tyres on the back.
Amongst all the organised chaos in the pits, Matt and his little brother Charlie, 13, and grandad Bob, got on with sorting out Matt's two cars. They looked pretty well prepped, but Bob ensured the boys werent doing anything too massively dangerous as he cast his eye over proceedings. Bob had just come over from France where, from his tan, it looks like he enjoys life rather well.
With the track fully watered to keep the dust from blanketing the M23 nextdoor, the racing was ready to go. There appeared to be anything from 10-12 laps. Anything like an overturned car would bring out the red flag which meant everyone stopped whilst the driver was retrieved, after which they formed up again and carried on, often leaving the stricken car on the track like some sudden chicane.
Alas for Matt, race 1 proved to be a bit of a non-event. In true GP-star style, he span out of the lead and stalled his knackered Micra and sat there, waiting to be t-boned at the apex of turn 1 (there's only 2 turns), for the rest of the race. Thankfully he emerged unscathed. The racing, even in the Kids category, is top stuff. Hammer & tongs all the way around, with a variety of lines and styles being used on the oval dirt track. The odd stuck-open throttle resulted in a fair bit of amusement as did some of the unconventional tactics deployed.
Using the Leica M9 for this sort of thing is quite a hoot. Obviously it's fantastic for static, close-ish portraits and documentary stuff. But for motorsport. It all depends on how you position yourself. Taking the decision to shoot for speed and motion, stopping the lens down to get 1/30th or 1/60th shutter speeds was the order of the day. Due to constantly changing light with clouds blowing over the sun all the time, I simply put it in aperture priority and let the electronics sort things out. Shooting DNG there's plenty of latitude to correct a slight under or over exposure on the PC later.
I had the Canon 1DIV with a 17-40 and 70-200 for other stuff. Without the 10 frames per second of the 1DIV, the Leica demands a more controlled approach where you are looking much more carefully at your timing, anticipating what's about to happen, and then pressing the shutter. It's a very pleasant way of doing things. With the 1DIV and 17-40 I was able to get nice and close (too close!!!!) and blast away. Get anywhere with gravel traps and catch fencing though and you might as well say bye-bye to the Leica and get the 400 2.8 lens out.
Anyway, back to the racing. It comes thick & fast, with the organisers dragging dead cars from the track quickly at the end of the race as the next set of competitors lines up in a roughly ordered manner. Somehow the announcer managed to keep track of what was going on as casualties abounded, with inverted vehicles strewn about all over the place.
Somewhere along the line, a chap called Stefan White won race 4, the Rookies World Dirt Final, thus becoming a world champion and enabling SLIK images to claim yet another world championship photoshoot.
Having had a bit of a word with the organisers, I was allowed up into "race control" on the custom made gantry (scaffold poles & planks). There I met banger racing's own Charlie Whiting whose name I completely forgot, as well as another very nice chap who runs Automotive Vehicle Recovery (good job to have if you're into banger racing). As always when photographing an event, trying out lots of different locations is the thing to do. I stood with some of the other photographers for a while, including a lighting engineer who has lit sets for Annie Liebowitz, before breaking out on my own and trying lots of different spots. The gantry was a super spot for some different angles.
So there you have it. Extraordinary entertainment for not much money. I was tempted to nip home and get my daughter's Peugeot 106 and give that a go. Not sure she'd be overly happy though. From cars on fire to kids eating ice cream, banger racing has it all. And what a super bunch of people. As you can tell from the number of words and pics in the post, I had an excellent time. Everybody there was happy to talk, be photographed, and generally get along with everyone else. With all the worries about the economy and unemployment, here was Britain at its best, having a right old laugh for not much money on a nice sunny Sunday. Bloody brilliant.
Don't forget - next meeting is on July 31st, and on September 11th it's back to "old school rules" with 1800cc and over pre-1975 cars on show - proper big things that demolish each other in spectacular fashion.
2011-07-10 Smallfield Banger Racing - Images by SLIK Images Sports Photography