One for the racing fans..

[freeman]

Last year I posted a short highlight reel of Watkins Glen Vintage racing footage. This is an extended cut with no music, only engine sounds. Enjoy:

all GH5 with mostly the sir magic 25mm .95 A few wide shots with the Olympus 12mm.

[wa666ou]

That is well shot film. I like how you just shot idling engines for longer time. I am a gearhead and I'd just listen and listen and you need to drag me away from a race track. I'd like to record some of the racing action this summer, but not sure what microphone would be good. I'm new to filmmaking, bought a Rode Videomic Pro Stereo, but no idea if it's up for the job.

[freeman]

On 3/27/2018 at 2:42 PM, wa666ou said:

That is well shot film. I like how you just shot idling engines for longer time. I am a gearhead and I'd just listen and listen and you need to drag me away from a race track. I'd like to record some of the racing action this summer, but not sure what microphone would be good. I'm new to filmmaking, bought a Rode Videomic Pro Stereo, but no idea if it's up for the job.

same here man I let those idle shots just roll  this whole video was shot with a rode videomic pro, but not stereo, its a mono shotgun.

[webrunner5]

Wow some of those cars where back in my hay day LoL. I was a Crew Chief, Mechanic on a D sports racer, and a B sports racer class, different owners, in SCCA back in the mid early to mid 70's. I dove a Formula V racer for a bit. I sucked at it LoL. I was better turning wrenches on them than driving one.   Went all over the US for races with them. We won the Central Division once with the D sports racer in 1972 I think it was. That stuff was a Lot of fun, but damn time consuming getting them ready to race, and driving there and back.

I don't know if any of you watch that show "Chasing Classic Cars", but the old guy, my age LoL, he Might be a bit older, the mechanic Richard on it, was a Unbelievable Formula V driver at the same time I was in it with SCCA. He was just about unbeatable. But he was a super nice guy, helped anyone that needed it. I think he drove a formula B Brabham  BT16 a few times also? I would have killed for that race car LoL. It would have killed me I guess! 

My best friend and I used to race enduro Go Karts, they were fast as hell. I have a single engine that would do 120 mph on the straights, he had a twin engine one that would do 150 mph! , and he bought a Gurney Formula A race car, # 001, the first one ,Gurney Eagle Formula A, he Ever made. It had a Chevy 302 with Hilborn Injection on it. We drove from Ohio to California to pick it up. It was used, well used LoL but a beautiful car, Red as hell, it was blue and white to start with. I dove it a few times and it was scary as hell. We had it a few times up to 180 mph. He was a Lot better at it than I was was so he drove thank God! Crazy times. He was 4 years younger than I am, and just died of Cancer a few years ago. Scary stuff Cancer.

The car looked pretty much like this one. Hell could even be it for all I know?  Sure looks the same other than the color.  It had side Pods on it when we bought it. Had to, due to rules changes. Before he bought it it had been wrecked at Laguna Seca and ended up in a Tree!! It had been repaired before we bought it and raced after. We talked to Dan Gurney a bunch of times on the phone. He was a damn nice guy.

[freeman]

5 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Wow some of those cars where back in my hay day LoL. I was a Crew Chief, Mechanic on a D sports racer, and a B sports racer class, different owners, in SCCA back in the mid early to mid 70's. I dove a Formula V racer for a bit. I sucked at it LoL. I was better turning wrenches on them than driving one.   Went all over the US for races with them. We won the Central Division once with the D sports racer in 1972 I think it was. That stuff was a Lot of fun, but damn time consuming getting them ready to race, and driving there and back.

I don't know if any of you watch that show "Chasing Classic Cars", but the old guy, my age LoL, he Might be a bit older, the mechanic Richard on it, was a Unbelievable Formula V driver at the same time I was in it with SCCA. He was just about unbeatable. But he was a super nice guy, helped anyone that needed it. I think he drove a formula B Brabham  BT16 a few times also? I would have killed for that race car LoL. It would have killed me I guess! 

My best friend and I used to race enduro Go Karts, they were fast as hell. I have a single engine that would do 120 mph on the straights, he had a twin engine one that would do 150 mph! , and he bought a Gurney Formula A race car, # 001, the first one ,Gurney Eagle Formula A, he Ever made. It had a Chevy 302 with Hilborn Injection on it. We drove from Ohio to California to pick it up. It was used, well used LoL but a beautiful car, Red as hell, it was blue and white to start with. I dove it a few times and it was scary as hell. We had it a few times up to 180 mph. He was a Lot better at it than I was was so he drove thank God! Crazy times. He was 4 years younger than I am, and just died of Cancer a few years ago. Scary stuff Cancer.

The car looked pretty much like this one. Hell could even be it for all I know?  Sure looks the same other than the color.  It had side Pods on it when we bought it. Had to, due to rules changes. Before he bought it it had been wrecked at Laguna Seca and ended up in a Tree!! It had been repaired before we bought it and raced after. We talked to Dan Gurney a bunch of times on the phone. He was a damn nice guy.

Wow what I would do to drive one of those! You put it wel though: kill to drive one, but it may kill you! Thanks for sharing your story, if you ever come up to watkins let me know! I’ll be going to the 6 hour race, nascar, and vintage GP this year

[webrunner5]

The biggest problem we had with learning to drive the Gurney Eagle was the damn gearbox. It had a Hewland 5 speed crash box in it. Which has straight cut gears in it and No synchronizes.

The damn shifter handle was about 3 inches long LoL, and the gate was about 2 inches long, and hell it was double clutch up and down, matching RPM's. Jesus LoL. Try doing that going into a hairpin turn at 180 mph! I Never got comfortable with it and the brakes were so Damn good they would upset the geometry if you stabbed them, and then you were swerving like hell..It was a Hairy ass ride I can tell you that.

[freeman]

35 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

The biggest problem we had with learning to drive the Gurney Eagle was the damn gearbox. It had a Hewland 5 speed crash box in it. Which has straight cut gears in it and No synchronizes.

The damn shifter handle was about 3 inches long LoL, and the gate was about 2 inches long, and hell it was double clutch up and down, matching RPM's. Jesus LoL. Try doing that going into a hairpin turn at 180 mph! I Never got comfortable with it and the brakes were so Damn good they would upset the geometry if you stabbed them, and then you were swerving like hell..It was a Hairy ass ride I can tell you that.

you had to double clutch on the way up too? what a handful and with all that power

[webrunner5]

1 hour ago, freeman said:

you had to double clutch on the way up too? what a handful and with all that power

 Yeah you had to hesitate a bit by lowering the RPM just to up shift. You had to take pressure off the gears, and then just force it into a higher gear. No hesitation or it would grind like hell. I think the car weighed somewhere around 1200 pounds and had around 500 horsepower. I know some had even more HP than that back in the day. It was just pretty crazy. I have no clue how someone, and they did, drove one of those cars @ 100%.

It was just every thing you did was a near death experience with it! too much throttle the tires spun anywhere anyplace, too much brake it was all over the place, miss a gear hell you just about had to stop and start over. It was a car you could make No mistakes if you were driving it hard, which hell neither of us could ever do. He was faster than I was in it, but he was a better driver on anything we raced. He had talent, not super talent, and I was just a average Joe Blow driver. I also was married with kids, and he was single with no kids when he had this race car LoL.. We both had about 100 near death experiences racing different stuff!

And I can't exactly remember but he paid somewhere between 5000 to 7000 dollars for it. I seem to remember 5500 bucks. He owned so much stuff, he was worse than me, and that is saying something! Crazy. He was big on motorcycles. Not Harley's, we both hated them, British and Japanese 2 stroke, 4 stroke race bikes. We liked road race bikes. Car Probably worth a Million today. It ran great, and came with a ton of spares. Not much engine wise, but extra rims, tires, brake parts, extra nose, wings on and on. It had a 4 barrel carb on it, but the guy had the original Hilborn Injection, so that helped.

Later in SCCA they made people put a 4 barrel on them to help slow them down. They were scary fast with the injection on them. So I put the Injection on it for him a little later after we Tried it in the Slow mode LoL.. Slow my ass. It probably ONLY made 400 HP then. I can tell you you were nervous before you drove it, when you were driving it, and after you got out for 15 minutes LoL.  Seemed like your voice raised a whole octave when you got out!.It was a F ing experience. But it was addictive. You wanted more of it.

We only drove it off and on for maybe 4 or 5 years. I drove it maybe 18 times, he drove it maybe 50 times. Both of us, maybe on the same day would spin it or run off the track in it at speed. We came to realize that we would probably die if we kept driving it. And a good friend of ours that had a car like it crashed Hard at the same track we raced at a lot. The Indy Speedway, the infield track.  We did Mid Ohio a lot also. We got more scared it would be us. So he parked it in his garage for I guess 20 years or more, and when he got sick with Cancer he sold it. I have no clue to who or for how much. I never talked to him before he died, and I didn't Ever get along with his wife he married. I lived in Florida when all this happened. I was not even at his funeral. My Mother went to it, and she wrote me a letter about a week later and said, oh by the way, John died. Oh, OK LoL. Such is life.

[webrunner5]

I can tell you we both admitted we had more fun racing Go Karts than anything, toward the end we when we had the money, we had engines, I used one , he used two of them, that were 250cc each, and made around 54 HP They were called B Bomb Motors, made in Italy. 2 Stroke engines.  My cart had to weigh a minimum of 212 pounds and his had to weigh 242 pounds minimum. And your ass was 2 inches at most off the pavement and you laid down in the enduro carts. We raced for 1 hour straight. Imagine his cart with 108 HP weighing in a 242 pounds! We took his one day to the drag strip and we put the lowest geared sprocket on it we could get and it ran the 1/4 mile in 10.2 seconds, I can't remember the MPH. the engines would Red Line at 18,000 rpm and he went through the traps at 14,000. We could not fit a lower gear on it because of how low the rear tires were. We took it to a local 1/2 mile Dirt track, Queen city Raceway, and the track record was 20.1 seconds. He went around it at 20.6 seconds and he could never get it up in RPM there either. It was crazy fast, scary fast actually.

We raced at Watkins Glen on a Saturday before the F1 Grand Prix, and and NBC was there with Radar guns, and they clocked him at 160 mph on the back straight in practice one lap when we were trying out different gear ratios!  It ran around 150 mph during the race to keep the engines from blowing up. But it wasn't cheap. He had over 8 grand in 4 engines, and probably 3 grand in the chassis, and this is in the mid 70's!! I had about 4 to 5 grand in my cart. I used most of his left over stuff LoL. He worked at the Camero, Firebird plant in Norwood, Ohio on the line, and I worked as a flat rate mechanic at a Jaguar dealership, we both made a ton of money and were both single at the time.

But we had a blast on the damn things, and neither one of us Ever got really hurt. We started out in the Sprint Kart races with McCullough engines on them racing at fairgrounds, and street races. and we just wanted to go faster and faster. Back then Karts had centrifugal clutches on them, now they have gears and shifters on them. That was Just coming in when we got out of it. We would have has to change everything to stay with them.

I raced motorcycles for awhile, just like my father did, and I spent two different times in the Hospital for extended times and gave that shit up LoL. I go crazy on motorcycles, even on the street! Funny because I drive on average pretty slow in cars. Not on a Bike. Fastest I have ever been was 188 mph in a Ferrari Daytona I was working on. I had a speeding ticket for 144 mph in Indianapolis, Indiana on the bypass in a Porsche 911 I drove back from California once that I hung on my wall for years Lol. And I had slowed down from like a 165 because of traffic. That was a trophy. I was a wild child. My mother still has no clue how I am alive yet. Me either. I came close to dying more running my heavy equipment in my Excavation Company than any motor vehicles I ever had. They are dangerous as hell.

Moral of the story is, if you like toys, big and small, and have lots of money you are willing to piss away, you might die using one. But then you might get hit by a bus, so hell enjoy it while you can. Me and my younger brother still laugh our asses off at times thinking back to the crazy stuff we and our friends have done. He was pretty normal except for Motorcycles, he kept on crashing them and kept doing it. And you think I am crazy. But he never made the money I made, he owned a Music Store. Stuff, especially electronics, keep getting outdated and you loose you ass with it. But you Have to carry the stuff. And he is more laid back than I am.

[ReinisK]

This looks so cinematic to my eye!

I don't know if it's because of the unique event, location, live sound, good compositions or what else, but at least half of the shots definitely look like out of some car racing movie. Very nice

I see you've shared the lenses used, but what about picture profiles and your grading settings?

[freeman]

14 hours ago, ReinisK said:

This looks so cinematic to my eye!

I don't know if it's because of the unique event, location, live sound, good compositions or what else, but at least half of the shots definitely look like out of some car racing movie. Very nice

I see you've shared the lenses used, but what about picture profiles and your grading settings?

I’ve always wanted to film a racing movie, I guess you could say i’m practicing. For profiles I think the Gh5 was set to the natural profile and then I used a combination of filmconvert and a couple little exposure and color tweaks per shot

[Stanley]

Nice work, and I could feel the sound with headphones on. Lenses and mic selection certainly worked on the gh5.