AMA motorcycle racing weekend

WOW....

All I have to say about that. I won some VIP passes to the AMA Suzuki SuperBike motorcycle races this weekend from www.sportbikes.com. I was so enthustastic about it, but I only found about the winning last Monday. I pretty much had to plan my whole trip on how to get out here to California. So I booked my airfare and hotel for about $1000, since it was last minute, and since I was investing a lot of money, time, and stress (I have exams next week...) I would make the best of it. I bought a nice Canon 70-200mm f/4.0 EF L telephoto lens, 430EX speedlight flash, two extra 2GB Compact Flash cards, and some other random accessories. That's about $1200 for that stuff. So the plan was to get as much work done as possible for a school project and hope on a plan to SoCal Thursday afternoon, then I plan return Monday and get through my final exams.

Anyhow, I arrive late Thursday night and planned to attend the practice session friday. I meet owner of sportbikes.com, Mike DiSabatino, and find out that the VIP passes still has some restrictions, but I then ended up getting a full fledge media pass. That's unrestrictive so I can go anywhere on the track and this gives me an ample opportunity to play with my new telephoto lens. Not only that, but I got to meet plenty of other photographers, magazine editors, publishers, racers and other interesting people.

I took over 2600 pictures Friday, which had about 1100 turn out to be good, and took over 4300 today. I haven't gone through it all since it's a lot of pictures, but I hand picked a few of them and posted it up on my album. If you want to see some pictures of the event so far, just visit my photo blog at jbazpics.blogspot.com - I'll add more pictures in the near future.

Hooters Bike contest

My buddies and I went to the local Hooters as they had a bike contest. It was a bit chilly than normal for the week as it was around 50's. Mind you this whole week was normally in the 70's and 80's.

Friend's 2003 GSX600 with reflected flames decal won. Even though it's been in about 20 wrecks and has a cracked frame...

That was about 1/2 of the bikes there... Not too much competition.

Lighting started to get hard once it got dark outside. Thank goodness I brought my tripod with me. :P

Bike Stunt Show

There was the motorcycle stunt show at the fair grounds today. I went with a few other bikers. Pretty much the only bikers that actually rode up since it was 40 and windy outside. The guys got some skills, but the show just sucked ass. They ended up starting 30 mins late and had almost no organization. The turnout was quite low and 1/4 of the stunts went bad because they couldn't get traction because of the smooth slick concrete surface.

Wasn't worth my $15 bucks. Most of the time they were just dicking around like when my friends and I have some fun. If they wanted to charge that kind of money, perhaps they should have some sort of choreography... About halfway into the show I was getting sleepy and yawning. And talk about motorcycles being indoors with after market pipes...

The motocross guys were actually good. They actually had some organized show, but most of my pictures are bad due to poor lighting. Getting shots where they are in mid air, a mix of bright/dark background, and light from artificial and natural sources is very hard to do.


The 14 yr old kid who stunts bikes. He was pretty badass actually. Funny how he can barely see over the handle bars.

A Harley being stunted... sadly 3 wheelies into the show, the bike broke down due to technical difficulties. There goes Ray Price's Marketing dollars...

Yeah... he's a squid... at least he's a cool fellow, talked to him a bit before the show. One of my other friends hanged out with him after the show. This guy showed my friend how to do circle wheelies correctly on his beatup honda hawk.

End of the show was just a big orgy of burnouts... So much smoke in the air that it set the fire alarms off and the Raleigh Fire Department showed up.

Stoppies...

I had a really long day at work and was a bit flustered from it. So when I got home I decided to hop on the 600rr and just play around. I tried stoppies for the 1st time and got pretty high. Probably messed around for 2 hours then my friend came over and took some pictures. I even did one or two rolling stoppies, but nothing too insane yet...