This past weekend was Round Two of our Masters of the Mountains racing series at Miller. I was very excited about going racing again for several reasons:
- It’s a beautiful time of the year at Miller
- I finally had my rear tire grip issues sorted, and was excited to see how that would translate to improved lap times
- I had some good friends from church coming down to watch me race
However, our [expletive deleted] RV had other ideas. On the way down to the track Friday afternoon, it broke down – AGAIN. Unbelievable. It’s supposed to be a pretty nice RV, that we paid a lot of money for. Yet it has pretty much been a lemon from day one. Problem after problem, often leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere. This time, at least, we were a little closer to civilization – near Mountain Home, Idaho, just an hour or so from home.
We had to call AAA for a tow truck, which had to be sent from Boise, to tow the RV back to the Ford dealership. My friend also had to come out with his pickup truck to tow my trailer back home as well.
At that point, even if I went home and hooked up the pickup truck to the trailer and headed back to Utah, I wouldn’t have gotten there until after midnight. The other option would be to leave early the next morning, but that would have meant missing all my practice sessions. I decided that it would just be too tough and unrealistic to think about racing this weekend, as much as I wanted to. If I can’t have complete mental focus on my racing, I don’t like to do it, and there was just too much that was out of sorts. I decided to bag it, and just drive my car down very early the next morning, and focus on photography for the weekend instead of racing.
It wound up being a fun weekend with my friends, as it pretty much always is, however on Sunday it was QUITE windy, gusting 40-50 MPH. It made things really rough on the racers, and pretty darn hard on the photographer too! I pretty much had to abandon the 600mm lens, as the wind was just moving it all over the place. And when that lens moves half an inch, it’s moving about 10 feet out on the track!
Here are a few of the photos that caught my eye during processing:
I accidentally overexposed this one, then decided I kind of liked the effect
The mountains are a beautiful backdrop to the "Attitudes" section of corners
Open Superstock racers exiting Turn One
Troy Siahaan shows textbook form while navigating the Attitudes
The view at the end of the straight as the racers tip in to turn one
Jerry Hicks flies through the turn called "Satisfaction"
The start of the Middleweight Superbike race
Jerry Hicks may need elbow pucks soon