Silverstone, Day 1: F1 First Practice Session

We set off from the hotel in Northampton with, we thought, plenty of time to make it to the circuit in time for the first F1 practice session of the weekend. Unfortunately traffic and the times being wrong in the details we received with the tickets meant that the cars had just rolled out onto the track as we were pulling into the car park. Even from inside the car the noise was loud. Once through the gate and into the Abbey enclosure the noise became deafeningly loud. With nothing but air between my ears and the cars I finally got to see an F1 car. Two things to note; the are exceptionally loud and exceptionally fast.

As I mentioned in the previous post you can tell just how quick the cars are by the fact that the auto setting on the digital camera was too slow to capture the cars in anything but slow corners. I had to switch settings and choose an exceptionally fast shutter speed to get anything approaching a crisp picture. Of course I still needed to press the button before the car had passed through the shot. Fortunately it was a very bright sunny day and so there was enough light to compensate for the fast shutter speed but that didn't help my reactions. Of the 84 photos we took during that session this one of current champion Lewis Hamilton is the best and even this photo isn't great. Our ability to photograph the cars got better as the weekend went on so later posts will be more interesting, honest!