Drive to Survive

 I was a Formula One enthusiast from the late 1950's-until the early 2000's. I followed the sport in magazines particularly Motor Sport magazine from the UK which I have subscribed to since the 1960s. I went to many grand prix in the UK, Germany, Italy, Belgium and of course Australia. I went to the first modern era Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide in 1984 and my last Australian GP was 2004.

That last race was the break point for me. I had become increasingly bored with the processional races and the Bernie Ecclestone show that F1 had become. The races in faraway places on new boring circuits where there was no public interest in F1 seemed to be on the calendar just to make El Supremo, Bernie, even richer. F1 had lost me and not just me - the worldwide TV audience was shrinking fast.

I went to the 2004 Grand Prix in Melbourne and that same year I flew to France for the weekend with my son  to the Le Mans 24 hour sports car race. Amazingly the weekend at Le Mans including accomodation, car hire, circuit admission and airfares to and from Paris from Sydney cost me less than the rip off weekend in Melbourne and the race was much more interesting. The F1 race weekend was supposed to be a 4 day event but really very little happened on the first two days but the hotels insisted you took a 4 night package regardless of the fact that the majority of interstate spectators flew home on the Sunday evening. 

Bernie had no interest in providing an entertaining package for the paying public at the races or on TV. Bernie's entertainment came only from one source- counting the shekels. His shekels.

The game changed in 2017 when the US entertainment company, Liberty Media, purchased the rights to F1 from Ecclestone. Wisely they immdiately took the geriatric Bernie out of the frame and started on the difficult task or reinventing F1. It took a little longer than they anticipated I suspect but one masterstoke changed the game for them-Drive to Survive- a documentary series on Netflix which follows F1 race by race starting with the 2018 season. The series really goes behind the scenes with very high production values. At the same time Liberty completely lifted the quality of the live TV coverage of the races with expert commentators who are also entertaining.

Drive to Survive pulled me and many others back into F1 but more importantly it also attracted millions of new fans to the sport. I am hooked again.The races this year have been superb-really edge of seat exciting. I am no longer nostalgically looking back at races such as the 1980 GP at Monza-photo above. The old F1 is gone but the new F1 is even more exciting. Yes, old dogs can learn new tricks.

 

On the road again

 

 

Lockdown was over on 11th October. Life is not totally back to normal but it is much improved. I still can't drive into regional NSW but this did not prevent me from joining up with Colin at Jerry's Cafe in Kulnura on last Monday morning for breakfast. Sadly Craig , the owner of the third silver Porsche of our trio, lives in Newcastle regional NSW, so he could not drive down to join us.

We have been promised that we will be able to visit regional NSW from 1st December so we will all be able to head north from Kulnura and up into the Hunter Valley on the glorious backroad on our next drive.

Colin and I arrived at the meeting point within 60 seconds of each other and considering that he had driven all the way from Mosman and I had come 40 mins across from Terrigal and the roads were really busy we did well.

We had a great drive up the Yarramalong Valley and up Bumble Hill. During the lockdown I only took my 911 out for two short local drives as we were only permitted essential travel. On those two drives I did not enjoy the car. It felt very agricultural compared with my Mini and I started to seriously consider selling it as I thought that I was perhaps over classic Porsche ownership.

The drive convinced me to keep the Porsche. The new 15"wheels and tyres I had fitted weeks before the lockdown felt really good and the engine was in fine form. Definitely a keeper-at least for a few more years.

Five faces from a road trip

 I was so fortunate to do my road trip in late April because within eight weeks New South Wales went into the lockdown which only ended yesterday, Monday 11th October, after 106 days.

The lockdown seemed interminable.The damage to the economy has been immense.The damage to the mental health of the community is incalculable. All down to the incompetence of our Federal Government see HERMIT KINGDOM  

During the lockdown I have had ample opportunity to look at my photo archive and in particular I looked at the photos I took on the April road trip and decided to see how some of the portraits would look reworked in monochrome - as black and white is now called in trendy circles.

Below are five faces from that trip. Firstly two kindly Coptic priests from Sydney who were visiting Dubbo in Western NSW and whom I met at the Western Plains  Zoo. Arabic speaking Coptic Priests found in the Western Plains Zoo sounds implausible but it's true. 

The other three faces are miners encountered in and around the opal mining centre of Lightning Ridge in Western New South Wales. Opal miners are a special breed. It's a very strange and usually hard way of life and that is reflected in the miner's faces.

The photos were taken with my Leica Q2 and the DNG (RAW) files were processed in Lightroom Classic and converted into monochrome using Silver Efex Pro2

Norwegian Idyll

 In 1967 Val, my then girlfriend and later wife, and I were members of a university expedition to the Svartisen Glacier and Beiardalen, a remote valley, north of Mo I Rana, inside the Arctic Circle in northern Norway. 

The valley had only been accessible by sea until 1965 when a road was built connecting the valley to a road connecting to Bodo to the north and Mo I Rana to the south.

We travelled from Newcastle in the UK to Bergen and then up the coast on the Hurtigruten coastal steamer to Mo I Rana. Back then the coastal steamer was not the cruise ship it is today. It was the cargo and mail boat for the coast of Norway and it carried supplies and locals to towns and villages. Our boat even carried a coffin which was unloaded late one afternoon in a small settlement-one Norwegian's last voyage. The journey took a few days and when we reached Mo I Rana the expedition truck was there to take us over the mountains to the valley.

A small group of us camped in an old school house in the valley for 6 weeks doing the fieldwork for our theses.The main group of the expedition went up on to the Svartisen Glacier to do their fieldwork.

I have very fond memories of that time in Beiardalen. The locals were very welcoming and very curious about their visitors.

The small group of us got on very well together.We found time to do our fieldwork and to explore the stunningly beautiful valley and climb up into the surrounding mountains. We were very fit. We had no transport as the truck had gone over the mountains with the glacier group so we walked long distances. It was all dirt roads and there was virtually no traffic.

The valley was idyllic. Norway was still a poor country then-the oil wealth came later-but the people in the valley seemed content. We went fishing with the locals and we were literally standing on the beach casting a line and pulling a fish in on every cast. They were most likely herring. We cooked them on a wood fire on the beach. It was light at midnight. It was the best of times. I often think about going back there to see how it has changed but sadly my chance has probably passed.

After we ended our time in Beiardalen Val and I travelled to Oslo from Mo I Rana by train and hitchhiking and camping along the way. Amazing to think that we carried all our clothes for the time we were away plus our supplies and camping gear on our backs. From Oslo we travelled by overnight ferry to Copenhagen and then by train to the Hook of Holland and ferry to Harwich. 

Below is a selection of Kodachrome slide photos from that wonderful time. They were taken by Val and I discovered them amongst hundreds of slides this week. They were taken on a Ricoh Auto Half half frame format camera. 

Half frame was a format which enjoyed a short period of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. It used standard 35mm film but each frame was half a 35mm frame so it gave 72 exposures on a standard 36 exposure cassette or 40 exposures on a 20 exposure cassette. The big appeal of the format was its lower cost however it required a half frame slide projector to project the slides and as the film ran horizontally in the camera and the format was an upright portrait format you had to turn the camera through 90º to take conventional horizontal/landscape format photos. Many people found this inconvenient and counter intuitive. The Ricoh Auto Half used byVal was almost square so it was much less of an issue for her.

The Kodachrome film used for these photos was only 10º ISO and it had very little latitude so taking a properly exposed photo with the Ricoh with its basic light metering system was not easy and almost a matter of luck. Sadly many of Val's slides are underexposed and cannot be recovered in scanning. However the ones I have managed to scan succesfully are very evocative of that great time.

Marvel -the rescue cat.

 Marvel has really made herself at home. I have been so lucky. It's difficult to believe that she is a rescue cat taken into the RSPCA shelter in Wyong back in April as a skinny little, lost cat with dirty ears. Now she has put on a lot of weight. She keeps herself very clean and I could not ask for a more affectionate. playful and pretty cat. She has exceeded all my expectations. 

Thanks C for persuading me to get another cat and thanks Ellie for finding her online for me.