Racing......

Friday was my first official day and this weekend was my first race.

Friday I got up at 9am and started driving around 10ish. I had a 4 and a half hour drive to Toledo where the speedway was.

I got to the track around 2:30 ate lunch with Steve and Tirzah, then I got the tour of the track and our truck.

Other than getting the tour and just getting situated not much happend.
Around 9pm Friday night we watched the Sprint Cars do a 50 lap feature.

Toledo is a half mile racetrack so imagine those cars with the wings on top going around it in 15 seconds. They averaged about 120mph.

Saturday came and I had to be on track by 6:30am so I could get video of the haulers coming in to the paddock. Once that was done I just got to shoot whatever I wanted of cars setting up and crews unloading cars, and getting tires and getting their pre practice inspections.

Practice was around noon so I was in the infield shotting random b-roll of the top ten in points and just a few other big shots.

Qualifying was after the Lincoln Welders Truck Series Qualifying so around 3pm I got up to the media booth where I was able to see the whole track and follow the cars around the track. I was just focused on the top 10 in points again. However.. a rookie who was at his first ARCA Racing event shattered the track record and achived the poll position. He ran a lap time of 15.895 which was almost a half a second ahead of second place!

So once qualifying was done I had to go interview the poll sitter.
I ran across the track, grabbed the microphone and xlr and ran to his hauler.

He was nervous and super excited because it was all new to him. The interview went fine my boss Steve asked the questions and all was well. After that I had to go back to the truck and get the interview edited and cut down for the web. So that took about a 15-20 minutes and then BAM it was on the web.

[link] its right there in the middle. Under more videos along with Matt Carter #46's Victory Lane interview.

So once that was done we called it an early night and crashed.

Didnt have to be on the track till 9:30 Sunday and it was nice... got to sleep in and just relax. Once we got to the track I didnt have a whole lot to do so I just messed around on the Mac with export settings for about 2 hours. Trying to get a good quality web product isn't as easy as it sounds. Anyawys 11am came around and the cars all got lined up in front of the grandstands and they did a big Fan Fest deal where you could meet the drivers and see the cars and such.

2pm the race started. I was locked and ready to rock up in the media booth when the green flag waved. It was a bump and run kind of race there were alot of cautions (18) so it was a long race. Including the 2 hour rain delay they had about half way through.

Once the race was over I had to run back to the truck as fast as I could to start editing because Speed needed the footage before 6:30. Since the rain delay happend we knew that it wasnt an option to get it to speed so I got to slow down a little. But I had to edit three things for post race. A few clips of the winner and any main parts of the race (crashes passes pits, ect..) That was for speed so it was high quality then I had to edit similar peice of the whole race for ARCA's Media page so that anyone that has access could go to the web, pull it down and use it. Then I had to encode the Victory Lane Interview for the web. All in about 2 hours. So I was crunched for time but it was fun!

Well that was my weekend... how was yours?

-Shawn