Bad Seats

I've heard it said by almost everyone who is familiar with the Bristol Track, that there's not a bad seat in the house. Well, today, I found some bad seats. I was working on camera 3 and noticed that behind the camera area was the supports for the 'skycam' and then noticed some seats behind that.

I took the time to go check it out and indeed - I found some bad seats. Photo above.

More Bristol

Thursday's set up went well enough. We had a bunch of dumb little technical problems that eventually worked themselves out. It was one of those days where a lot of very small things kept going wrong and taking your time.

The Bristol Raceway is really coming to life. With the small infield - it doesn't take much to fill it up. Bristol's racetrack is the size of a very large football stadium and seats 165,000 people. Unlike the other tracks that I've been to - there's no infield parking/camping for the spectators. If you're watching the race, you're either in a beacher seat or at home.

While working in the infield/pits on thursday, I was talking to one of the crew from Jeff Gordon's team about the "car of tomorrow' that they're using here. For non-Nascar fans, there's a new style car that being used here at Bristol called the "car of tomorrow" (COT). It has some enhancements that improve safety and make the the race a more level playing field. Anyway, what I didn't know (and most Nascar fans probably know this) is that every car out ther has the same body shape. There's not really an Impala SS shaped car or a Camry shaped car - they're all the same shape except for some contour lines in the hood. If they were all painted grey, you couldn't tell them apart. There seems to be some 'unhappiness' with some about this fact.

So, with this COT in place, they are able to measure each car more accurately to assure it conforms to the prescribed shape. They have a couple of stations set up here that each car must go through and be measured. I think the basic template measurement has been around for quite a while, but they have a new 3 dimensional template that they lower onto the car to make sure it's the right shape. It was interesting to watch them do this - but I couldn't believe how long it took. It took them basically all day to measure the cars.
The template being suspended from the measurement tent.


The officials measuring Car 7 with the template


Here's some other images from Bristol
The Television Compound


A shot of the Pit Area


The cars lineup and wait to be measured


A FAST UPS truck

Bristol

When I flew out of Daytona Beach today, I had a treat that I haven't had since I started flying out of there. I was able to sit on the left side of the plane during an 'easterly' takeoff. Usually I'm either on the right side of the plane when we take off toward the ocean or when I'm on the left side of the plane, we take off toward the west. The reason that matters is that I was able to see my boat from the plane today. The photo above shows the Halifax Harbor Marina and my boat is in the photo.

After getting to Atlanta, I changed planes to a turboprop for the trip to Bristol Tennessee. A funny thing happened that I can't explain completely. I was taking a photo of the hotel that I stayed in last week after we took off and when I looked at the photo, I was amazed to see some strange things with the image of the prop. It has become distorted and weired. My first thought was that the exposure was too long - but that would have created a blurred prop and not a distorted prop. I took several more photos during flight and they all came out kinda the same. Since this is taken with my 3.2 megapixel phone camera, I figured it must have something to do with the 'refresh rate' of the sensor/display - but still I don't know. Maybe my buddy Jeff Obrien who is a photographer and reads my blog will have an idea. If so, Jeff - leave a comment with your opinion so everyone can read it.

The first photo below is of the prop at rest on the tarmac and the second photo is one of the freaky ones.



Once at Bristol, we started to work right away. This speedway is indeed different from the others I've been to. It's only a 1/2 mile track - compared to 2 and 1/2 at Daytona and 1 and 1/2 at Atlanta. The smaller track allows for the whole speedway to be contained like a football stadium. My guess is there's not a bad seat in the place for watching the race. The small size of the venue makes it much easier to get all of our stuff set up due to the fact that we can get everywhere much quicker.

Photos below of the Bristol Track.

Off to Bristol

I'm sitting here in the Daytona Beach airport - waiting for my plane to board. It's Wednesday morning and it seems like I just got back from my latest trip to Atlanta. I guess relatively - I did just get back - it was 46 hours ago. I'm really enjoying the job. It's just challenging enough and I like the group of guys that I work with. Some things about the Nascar gig are not quite as good as football - but some things are better.

On the good side:
As you know, commercial air travel is not quite as fun as it used to be. It's much closer to the train system in Europe - where you hurry from one place to another and get crowded into a seat. With this thought in mind - one of the upsides of the Nascar work is that for each travel effort - I'm getting in more work days. Football was 4 paid days and Nascar is 6 paid days. That's a good thing.

The food: In football, they would feed us a 'pre-show' meal because they didn't want the crews leaving on game day and getting stuck away from the venue. In Nascar - beginning on thursday - they will feed us breakfast, lunch and sometimes dinner every day. Also, there's always a large spread of snacks, coffee, softdrinks, gatorade, and water sitting there if you get hungry. Basically, they're trying to make it where we never have to leave the premises. We still get paid our full $50 per day (per diem) anyway. This is cool.

The crew: In football, I was in charge - for good and for bad. I didn't have anyone else on site to 'turn it over to' when something went wrong. I would have a helper, but when I was lead tech - I had (theoretically) the most knowledge about our system - so the pressure was high to get it done. I had a tech support line that I could call for phone help, but still - when things went really bad - I was the person responsible.
In Nascars, there's a large crew and I'm very low on the totem pole as far as expectations of bringing the show to air. There is a part of the job that I'm expected to know very well - and I do - but it's not the 'high anxiety' type of stuff. My largest job is to be one of the 5 guys who sets up the whole network of the show - all the hardware that brings the info into the production truck. It's very important - but it's not 'high anxiety' work. I really like that. I also work the 3D cam -but it's turning out not to be a big deal in regard to pressure.

The Bad parts of Nascar - compared to football - also has a good side to it. It's the schedule. Being gone 6 days at a time - I really miss Jan and home. I put a lot of effort into trying not to think about it and I think that's key to enjoying the job more - but it's still there. The good side of this is that I'll work a couple of weeks on and then have 2+ weeks off. I really like that alot.

Another bad part is that hotels are not generally as nice as the hotels in football. They don't build most racetracks in large population centers and so the hotels are not usually nice or plentiful. I haven't experienced this until this coming week - out hotel is a Holiday Inn Express that's located 33 miles from the track. The experienced crew says this is more normal than not in Nascar.

My plane is about to board - I'll post more later - with photos from Bristol