Formula 1 2015 Discussion

Here is a good example of how fricken close we were to the track on race day. This is Kimi's car getting prepped for the recon lap.

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And here is a shot of the after concert. Elton John shot from about 200 yards away with a 600 mm lens on a crop sensor camera.

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I've barely gone through any of the thousands of pictures I took. Not sure how much people want to see, so I may hold off and not totally spam the thread with pics. If there is sufficient interest, I'll certainly post more. I have lots of shots of cars on recon prep, some race pics, and some pit action race stuff. I was close to Williams, RBR, Ferrari, and button. I also got some good grid rollout pics of the other teams
 
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TomcatMF said:
Other than the race itself, the weekend was a total disaster. First we had to drive through some of the worst weather I have ever seen late at night in the middle of nowhere. I thought we were going to die. Then I forgot to pack a few things in the car, so my wife was pissed at me all weekend. We went to the track on Friday morning and caught practice 1, but when we tried to leave our car got stuck in the mud because the lot we were parked in wasn't paved. The weather was so bad on Saturday we decided not to go to the track. It's a bummer I missed out on visiting the paddock. Then they closed the lot where I had paid a lot of money to park in and made us catch a shuttle from downtown Austin where we had to pay for parking AGAIN! I had enough so I complained to COTA management about it, and they upgraded my tickets to Turn 12 which turned out to be great seats where I got to see a lot of overtaking and a crash. The race itself was epic, and I was happy to see McLaren running P5 and P6 for a while. I loved watching Red Bull take the fight to Mercedes early on. Evendors though the end result was the same as it has been most of the year, there was a lot of exciting action throughout the race in all parts of the field.

Then on my drive back home a truck kicked up a rock that damaged my windshield. Then later on I head a truck tire tread that damaged the wheel well on my wife's car. And now she is pissed at me again. FML.
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I pushed so many cars out of The F parking lot mud that I lost count of them. My little Corolla rental car had no issues, but a lot of the parking areas were impassable on Friday and Satutday. I had F lot parking, and that lot stayed open the whole weekend. they changed the car parking arrangement, but the lot stayed open. I heard a ton of shuttle bus horror stories. Sorry to hear you had such a tough weekend. I was cold and wet the entire time, but that was a pretty small annoyance compared to what you and many others had to deal with.
 
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Here are a couple more cool pics from the straight into turn 12 from my Friday practice seat. Alonso blasting through some rain at around 200 mph.
 
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I haven't had a chance to watch the race yet, and I have miraculously avoided any spoilers (even skipping straight to the post above to see the pics). I don't know any if the results yet.

Having said all that, that looks a lot like Kimi Raikonnen crawling all over Lewis Hamilton and about to go by him. Maybe I'm wrong, but that pic gives me hope.

I'm going to try and watch it tonight.
 
Tiltsa and Tomcat: You guys took some great photos. I am going to assume both of you are accomplished photogs and it was not just the camera.

Nicely done!
 
2112 said:
Tiltsa and Tomcat: You guys took some great photos. I am going to assume both of you are accomplished photogs and it was not just the camera.

Nicely done!
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In my case it definitely was just the camera. I find that if I take enough pictures, a few of them come out OK.
 
And in this blurry shot you can see RedBull running some sort of airflow meter on the back of the car...right in front of the rear tire. Never saw this before, but I couldn't get a good shot of it.

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An interesting factoid...I was talking to a corner worker on my track walk time after the race about what happens to all the car parts that fly off after crashes and he said anything big enough to pick up is returned to teams for the FIA car weigh in after the race. Apparently, even wrecked cars can be picked for random weight inspection, and they need to have the broken pieces. The teams also want the parts afterwards to see if they can determined how they failed. He said it wasn't unusual to have a runner from a team walk over to the corner after a crash with a bag to collect all the fragments.
 
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I did manage to fulfill my dream of picking up some race tire clag on the track. I got a good sized handful of rubber shreds.
 
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