tourenwagen

This past weekend I attended the BMW club racing school at Thunderhill. We had a variety of exercises on track, each followed by about an hour of classroom time. These built up to a “simulated racing exercise” at the end of Sunday, during the eighth track session of the weekend.

We had had practice starts, practice running side-by-side, practice passing, practice restarts, etc. Session 8 was to put it all together.

About the technique on display in the video below, did I mention I’m rusty? This is my tenth day on track after a multi-year hiatus. It’s my seventh day ever driving this car on track. And it’s my first time to Thunderhill since about 2000. So the sawing on the steering wheel through most corners (damn that wide angle lens), ignore that. Also, my entries to turn 8 and turn 14 are hideously slow, as becomes apparent at some crucial moments in the track session. And my line through 15? It’s unfortunate that I have such a crappy line through the single most important corner on the track.

Without further ado (and excuses), the video below starts with the formation for the restart and runs through the last two laps and the checked flag.

Click the image to play the video. Right click to save the video. Saving the video gives you more control over the Quicktime player settings, e.g., the size of the video window.

(For video geeks: It’s 256 x 144 at 60 frames per second (from 720p60 source) in MPEG-4 part 2 at 500 kbps with 64 kbps AAC audio, wrapped up in Quicktime, with file size of about 25 MB.)

Update:

Still don’t have the full session posted, but here’s a higher resolution versijon of the restart. Click the image to play the Quicktime video, or for best results, right click to download the clip.

Video coding details: 1280×720p original acquisition, re-coded at 512×288@59.94p in FCP using Apple’s h.264 encoder at 500 kbps with 64 kbps AAC audio inside a Quicktime wrapper for a file size of approx 25 MB. Encode time for this short clip was around 3 hours on a Mac Pro.

Update 2:

Full session from formation to checkered.

Approx. 100 MB, same coding profile as above. Right click to download for best results.