Bathurst 12 hours-another great race

It was the Bathurst 12 hour GT race last weekend.For overseas readers Bathurst is a country town about 3 hours drive over the Blue Mountains west of Sydney,Australia. It is also the home of one of the world's greatest motor racing circuits-Mount Panorama. It's up there with the Nordschleife Nurburgring. Better than Spa. And even better than Le Mans.Yes it's that good.
Every time I stand at the top of the mountain and watch the cars rocket across the top at Skyline and down the Dipper I just say wow-this is real motor racing.
One of the great aspects of the 12 hour race is that it is not expensive to attend and you have full access to the pits and the padddock on the general admission ticket. This may change in the future as the rapacious V8 Supercar organisation owned by private equity have bought 50% of the race and they do not have a good record of looking after any other interests but their own. Just like Formula 1. If they do screw it up it will be a great shame but money always talks and it is hard to be optimistic.
This year's race was cooler than last year's-thank goodness. It was hot in the afternoon but not heatstroke hot. And the race was just as exciting.There were 29 changes of lead in the 12 hours and five different marques made up the top five places-McLaren,Nissan,Bentley,Audi and Mercedes. And the winner set a new circuit lap record and won by just 1.8 seconds.
And the Stone and Wood draught beer in the Hotel Canobalas in Orange where I stayed tasted great Saturday evening and Sunday evening.
In summary it was a great weekend.
Some action photos from the race with some paddock photos in the next blog post.

The start at 5.45am.An early morning wake up as I stayed in Oprange -54kms away.

Dawn breaking,Brake rotors glowing at the end of Conrod Straight.

Porsche Cayman entering Caltex Chase in the early morning light

The winning McLaren setting an cracking early pace as the sun rises over the Blue Mountains in the distance

Fast food.The McDonalds sponsored Ferrari did not bring home the bacon.

Audi R8 powering up the Mountain

The second placed Nissan coming out of the Cutting late morning

The third placed Bentley

The fifth placed Mercedes SLS

Porsche class winner descending the Dipper

Winning Mclaren fighting Bentley for lead mid afternoon

Porsche coming down the Dipper

Porsche and Audi turning onto Syline at the top of the Mountain.

Fifth placed Mercedes coming down pitlane

Over Skyline and into the Dipper

All photos by JohnS using a Sony a7 and 90mm Zeiss Biogon and  200mm Minolta Rokkor lenses. Both manual focus lenses.The Zeiss lens is superb and gives beautiful results which barely need any processing.
The Minolta lens which I bought for A$12 off eBay gives surprisingly good results after work in Lightroom.
The irony is that I used to have a superb Canon 70-200 F2.8 lens and 2X converter but I sold all that gear years ago when I decided that my days of dragging a big lens and cameras around a race track were over. That was then this is now and at least the outfit I used on Sunday was light and small.

Hey, good looking

There are a lot of good looking cars around nowadays and great styling is no longer confined to the top end of the market.The Mazda 6 saloon is to my eyes a really great looking car and there are many others including some very stylish compacts and SUVs.
But of all the current big crop of good lookers the latest Mercedes Benz C Class takes the prize for me. It is a continuation of the long established C Class look but the detailing is superb.It looks as if it has been forged from a solid billet of steel. And apparently the beauty is not skin deep-it drives very well too. No wonder it is selling so well.
I photographed this one on the street in Terrigal very early morning last week. I saw a white example on the same street in daylight the next day.Silver certainly brings out the best of the shape.It does not look nearly as good in white-the subtle lines of the panels do not show in the same way. It's another case of catching the light-see previous story.

Another oaf

If Formula one racing was not in enough trouble already - with tedious boring races dominated by one team-falling TV audiences-race promoters unable to afford the F1 race fee -some of the small race teams on the brink of bankrupcy- and Bernie Ecclestone the F1 supremo offending people left ,right and centre-it now has its own sexist oaf-a man apparently in the mould of Jeremy Clarkson-Lewis Hamilton- who has used the victory champagne as a weapon to spray the poor podium girls at three successive grand prix.
Apparently social media is alight with Hamilton's critics and defenders.To me it seems an open and shut case.The man is behaving like an oaf.Look at the photos below and decide for yourself whether the poor woman is being assaulted by Hamilton.
Time to grow up and apologise Lewis.You are a disgrace.I am surprised that Mercedes have not stepped in as in my experience German companies are usually very correct about their employees public behaviour.

Night and Day

The ceramic disc rotors on the Erebus Motorsport Mercedes SLK glowing in the dark as the car brakes at the end of Conrod Straight in the opening laps of the Bathurst 12 hour race.This was taken on the Sony a7 at 1/400th second at 6400 ISO with the Hasselblad 150mm Zeiss lens.I probably should have bumped the ISO upto 12800 and used 1/1000th second and it would be sharper.
At the start of the race at 5.50 the temperature at Bathurst had barely reached double figures but as soon as the sun came over the horizon it started to warm up and if you were not wearing a hat by 10.00am you were a serious candidate for sunstroke.These guys-below- photographed in the paddock were doing the sensible thing.
Midway through the race Matt Bell driving one of the Bentleys became dehydrated and suffered a lapse of concentration at the top of the mountain but made it back to the pits for a driver change and they rehydrated him and amazingly he recovered and was leading the race upto the final two laps and finished fourth.

Monaco Grand Prix 1976

John Crawford dug deeper into his archives after finding the shot of the Renault 16TS in the previous post and has come up with a great selection of shots he took of the 1976 Monaco Grand Prix.
John had the benefit of a media pass and he made full use of it to capture some great atmospheric scenes from the race including a shot of motoring journalist,Motor Sport magazine's Continental Correspondent Denis Jenkinson who signed himself as DSJ.

Now "Jenks" as he was affectionately known was more than a little eccentric and more than a little mad.He was very short and sported a bushy beard.Quoting from Wikipedia :-
"He spent his summers touring Europe and his winters in a succession of 'digs' in England; Jenks eventually settled near Crondall in Hampshire in a tiny run-down house with no mains electricity or water, largely full of his archives and of parts of vehicles he was 'fettling'. He was legendary in the sport for the lack of basic domestic amenities in his home; to Jenks nothing mattered but racing. He became accepted as the 'elder statesman' of British racing journalists due to his closeness to the teams and drivers, his conversational writing style and his obvious and enduring passion for the sport."

Jenks navigated for Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia road race in Italy in the winning Mercedes.This was an extraordinary drive-they averaged over 160kmh for the 1000 miles over public roads.His account of that drive is considered a motor sport classic.Before that Jenks had been passenger for Eric Oliver when he won the 1949 world motorcycle sidecar championship.Being a pasenger in a racing sidecar on the unsafe tracks of 1949 required a special kind of madness which made Jenks an ideal navigator for Stirling Moss on that epic Mille Miglia.

Jenks was a great journalist and he played a key part in developing my personal enthusiasm for motor racing.He definitely triggered my enthusiasm for Porsches as he had a 356 as his company car and he used it to crisscross Europe during the F1 season visiting the tracks.What a wonderful life.He wrote about his travels in his monthly Motor Sport columns which I devoured with an enthusiasm which it is difficult to appreciate today.And they were long,detailed columns in a very small font-not a few paragraphs.He also wrote a number of books including the very readable "A passion for Porsches" and "A passion for Motorsport".At the time Porsche was almost unknown in the UK and Jenks' advocacy of the brand did much to put it on the map-not least with me.I even went and bought a 356 at the time-although regrettably it was only a Dinky model.

I met Jenks at the 1996 Goodwood Festival of Speed where Stirling Moss was driving the Mille Miglia winning Mercedes up the hill.Jenks was sitting in a secluded shady spot well away from the action and I came upon him quite by chance.He was very frail and obviously not at all well but we chatted for a few minutes.It would have been crass to take his photo so I did not.Sadly he died later that year.

One of the photos below shows three times F1 World Champion Jackie Stewart who had retired from F1 in 1973 and was in Monaco as a commentator for US ABC and for mixing with the rich and famous.
Now he is rich and still famous and is still mixing with the rich and famous.Along the way he has made a serious amount of money including the masterstroke of selling the struggling Stewart F1 team to Jac Nasser's Ford in 1999 for a very large wheelbarrow load of money.The team then became the struggling Jaguar F1 team before being sold to....but that's another story.I'm sure Jac Nasser is still on Jackie's christmas card list.


Niki Lauda won the 1976 Monaco Grand Prix in a Ferrari.A few months later he he suffered horrific burns-including losing both ears- in a fiery crash in the German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring.Amazingly he recovered enough to race in the Italian GP six weeks later and only lost the World Championship by one point to James Hunt after he pulled out of the rain deluged final race of the championship,the Japanese GP, due to the conditions.

The 1976 Formula 1 season was the subject of the film "Rush"- by far the best motor racing film ever made.It is definitely better than Steve McQueen's "Le Mans" because it has a storyline.

What a contrast that era is to today's highly contrived and controlled F1 circus.
A year ago I read a story on Australian F1 driver Daniel Riccardio which made a big point of how approachable and personable he was and how he chatted to fans and journalists without a PR spin person at his elbow.What a difference a year makes because this weekend I read a very tedious story on him based on a recent interview where a PR person sat in on the interview.Au revoir Mr Natural hello Mr Wooden PRspeak.Why do they do it? Jenks would have hated it.
Thank you John for these great photos and for stirring some personal memories.

Niki Lauda on his way to taking the chequered flag.It's been a long time since a Ferrari has seen the chequered flag in F1 in recent times.They have Seb Vettel on the team for 2015.Best of luck-they will need it.

The start.Look at the lack of protection for the photographer and the officials .One touch and a car or debris would be into them.

What an atmosphere and what great weather.

View from an apartment towards the swimming pool .

James Hunt walking back to the pits after retiring on lap 24 with an engine problem.He looks pretty deflated

Louis Chiron.Veteran racing driver.Monagesque and Chief du Corse for the Grand Prix.He died in 1979.

Nikki Lauda -complete with ears -interviewed after winning.The interviewer seems bored.

Motor sport journalist extraordinaire Denis Jenkinson.And how about those high waisted pants on the guy standing next to him.Let's hope that they never come back into fashion-if they ever were in fasion that is.

Jackie Stewart.I've heard of a wing collar but never heard of a delta wing collar.Knowing JS it was very fashionable at the time.

Stylish Merc

Long term readers if the blog may remember my lack of enthusiasm for the first matte black SLK Merc I saw back in 2010 at the Le Mans Classic.Since then the matte black finish has become more popular and I still think that on most cars it looks just grungy-which of course maybe the intention.Recently I have seen a couple of Hyundai Veloster Turbos in what must a factory finish matte "gunmetal" grey and they looked terrific and a few weeks ago I saw this Mercedes in Munich in the same finish and I reckon it  looks superb.