A few images from Andy Knight test session at Ruapuna, Andy is skidding one of the new V8 Supertourer in the last & greatest New Zealand race series.
It’s got to be nearly 2 years ago that Cameron (editor of Top Gear NZ) mentioned about the possibility of going to Singapore to cover the only night race on the Formula 1 calendar. The 2010 race came and went with no sign of a photography brief let alone a plane ticket…. While I was packing my bags for a trip to Europe I got “the call”. I pretty much got back from England repacked and headed off to Singapore with Steve Vermeulen, journalist for TG.
It was very cool to be back down the pit lane, in a previous life I was actually a race mechanic, I worked for Arrows & Renault F1 teams for 5 years and it had been 9 years since I was last down an F1 pit lane. To be honest nothing had really changed, same faces, the cars are a little more sculpted, the pit garages are a bit more bling but to be honest, it felt just the same. Accept I was no longer rolling around on the floor under a race car, which was nice ! The story ran in November’s issue of TG here in New Zealand.
November’s issue of Top Gear. Click here for more images
I couple of weeks ago I got a call to attend The New Zealand 2011 Motorsport Awards evening which was to be held at Te Papa museum. The awards evening is to celebrate the championship winners and also various media awards. Obviously I was never going to win an award for my journalistic skills, but I did manage to collect the “Motorsport Photographer Of The Year 2011″ award.
Unfortunately I was unable to attend the awards due to other commitments but Sarah Byles was good enough to collect the award on my behalf. Apparently she did awesome speech and is a lot better looking (as someone pointed out). I asked her to thank a few people on the evening amongst them were Richard Giltrap and Douglas Blair from Porsche, it’s been great to work with a brand that see’s the value in my style of photography (blurry logos) and what I can offer, so thank you to all the Porsche personnel, teams and drivers for putting up with me and my camera.
And congratulations to Andrew Bright who collected the “Single Shot” Award and what was more impressive is that he survived working with me for the season.
Full Portfolio inside.