It was a weird weekend for weather in north Georgia. Friday was as humid as I’ve ever seen it there but the ground was dry and showed no signs of all the rain they had last week. Then Saturday was 65°F and drizzly/misty until around 3pm. Around 3 it started raining harder and within a half hour or so it was lightning. When it started lightning in the area they red-flagged the race, I waited for an hour or so for some of the crowd to thin out then I moved the car down to Turn 6 on the far end of the track at a location where we could see the corner from the car in case they resumed racing. They never did, though. We finally left around 5:30pm, it was still lightning and they had a lot of water runoff going across the track so it was pretty obvious they wouldn’t get going again. They called it complete after around 7pm, the cars had completed a little over 400 miles of racing by that time. The racing we saw was very good, though. I’m always amazed at the importance of this race throughout the world. There is always a large contingent of French fans who come over to watch the Peugeot team race; I also spoke to people from Ireland, Japan, The United Arab Emirates, and Germany.
This was taken Saturday morning from the front stretch looking down into a very damp Turn 1, about 30 minutes before the race started. It occurred to me that it must be pretty daunting to run down into that corner at 185 MPH in the rain…
The rest of this group was taken Saturday in varying degrees of dampness:
These last photos were taken Friday when it was sunny and hot:
The next photo is a spider I encountered hanging from the fence where I was taking photos. It was a large one but rather pretty I think:
The last photo is from the autograph session Friday afternoon:
The driver on the left crashed their car badly during Thursday practice, he ran over a Porsche going down into the corner and somersaulted the car three times. It wrote off the carbon fiber tub so the team had another one air-freighted in Thursday night. When this photo was taken the team was five hours into a twenty-hour all-nighter to assemble the bare tub into a workable race car, you could see them working in the open tent right behind the autograph session. It was first fired up at 5:30am on race morning, it hadn’t turned a lap before pre-race warm-ups. It’s a pretty nice gig to be a professional driver, you get paid large sums of money to drive those cars and after you destroy one you get to sit in the shade of a pair of 38C’s and sign autographs while your mechanics are rebuilding a race car in 90° heat and 100% humidity. They only went out and finished 6th overall and won their championship with a car that had never turned a wheel before the morning of the race… |
Loading...
