Grand American Road Racing

Kanien posted a few pictures of me at the Grand Am race. I thought I'd post some more. I was working as a utility. I was assigned a camera operator to work with, and it was my job to make sure he didn't get hit by cars in the pit. I was also responsible for changing the batteries on the camera, and whatever else might arise.

All the production is done in trailers that are towed from city to city by semi trucks. That way the crew can follow the race to each location. Here I'm coming out of the RF truck. They won't allow any cables in the pit, so the pit cameras are RF (radio frequency) cameras. If I worked race TV full-time, I'd want a job with the RF company...they're sub-contracted by the production company, and they don't have to run much cable at all. Each hard camera has thousands of feet of cable running from the truck to the camera. The longest cable we ran was over 6,000 feet. There were fourteen hard cameras, and three RF cameras on this shoot. The one I did in July had 22 cameras total.

This is the inside of one of the race cars. It doesn't look too comfy. The Grand Am circuit is the most affordable pro racing series to own a car in. In July I was at an American Le Mans race. Those cars have carbon fiber chassis that cost $375,000.00...that's just the price of the chassis. The Grand Am circuit cars have steel chassis...this makes them about 20mph slower (180mph is their top speed), but they're much cheaper.

Here I am on the crew side of Pit Row. This is where all of the crews have their car monitoring gear and tools. They can monitor everything from tire pressure to oil pressure to gas mileage right from their computers. It's all transmitted back to their computers wirelessly. This is the safe side of the pit. If you know a racer, you can get a pit pass, but you have to stay on this side of the pit. In NASCAR, Indy Car, and Formula 1 racing, they won't even allow cameras on the opposite side of the pit, so Grand Am and American Le Mans are unique in their letting us go right next to the cars.

You can't really tell, but here I'm on the opposite side of the wall that separates the cars from the crews. This is where you have to be careful. I'm wearing a headset so the truck can call me if anything is going wrong with the camera. The headset muffles the noise from the cars. This muffling is nice because you can actually hear stuff coming across the radio, and you save your hearing, but you can't really hear any of the cars...so if you're not watching, you could get hit. It's happened before (or so the director told me), and it's not something they like to repeat. That's why I was in the pit...to alert the camera operator of any incoming cars or dangerous situations (tires, wrenches, etc).

Here's a close-up. That's my operator in the background...his name was Schalzee. I don't know if that was his first name or his last name...but that's what we called him.

Here's Cameron. He's the one that got me the job here...anything I've done with TV can be traced back to him...He got me working at the Grizzlies games, and any utility job I've done has been because he's told the production company I'm available.

On one of the first pit stops of the day, this Ferrari caught on fire. When they fuel the cars, a person stand right next to the fuel intake with a fire extinguisher. Their fuel is quite volatile, and if a fire is left burning for more than a few seconds, it can spread to the car and burn it out in a matter of minutes. So....I was walking around this car when all of a sudden I saw some flames come from the side opposite me, and someone yelled, "Fire!" They had about three extingishers on it in a matter of seconds, but the pit crew was throwing people over the wall, the driver exited in about 1/2 a second, and the race officials were running the opposite way. Lucky for me, my camera operator decided to get a closer look, so we walked TOWARDS the flames. Here you can see some of the smoke and the dust from the extinguishers.

Part of the draw of the Grand Am circuit is their specialization in endurance races. Their races range from 2.5 hour sprint races to a 24 hour mega-endurance Race. The race here was a 9 hour endurance race. That's a loooooooong race. They have two drivers, and each driver takes two shifts. Here it's starting to get a little bit dark, but nothing like it was around 8:30. The race went from noon to 9:00 pm. This car (Krohn Racing's #76) is driven by Jorg Bergmeister and Colin Brawn. Jorg won the overall Grand Am championship, but his partner wasn't eligible because he'd missed a couple of races. His partner, Colin, is 17 years old and couldn't race at a couple of races because their main sponsor was a tobacco company. US law says you can't be endorsed by a tobacco company in any form if you're under 18 years old. Anyway...I just thought he was pretty young.

The Krohn Racing team drives a car based on the Ford GT, a contemporary of the Ford GT-40. Ford couldn't really compete in races like these from the late '60s through 2004, as their Mustang engine wasn't really fast enough to compete. The GT 40 was a great endurance racer during the '60s, and even won the 24 Hours of Le Mans four times from 1966-1969. Here we're on the other side of the car...you had to watch out for tires, wrenches, crewmen, and other tools flying around the cars. I got hit by a flying pneumatic wrench in the ankle...that made the crew really really mad...they told us if we wanted to record their pit stops, we had to give them more room. They were the #1 qualifying car, so I can see why they were angry.

You can see the fuel line going into the car here on the left. They have two hoses that go into the tank: One is for fuel, the other is an exhaust hose so air can escape out of the tank. That's how they fuel so quickly.

Here's a night shot of one of the cars....This car was based on a Pontiac GTO. These cars are called Daytona Prototype cars...They've got a top speed of around 190mph. That's pretty fast, eh?

In case you're wondering about getting into racing like this, you've basically got to be a billionaire, or close to it. The guy who owns those green cars, the Krohn Racing cars, is worth over 1.9 Billion dollars. He actually races in one of his two cars. Maybe you don't have to be that rich, but you've got to be pretty darn rich to be able to afford it. If you want something affordable, get into scooter racing.