Once every year, german car magazine Sport Auto organizes a huge event at the Hockenheimring, which includes the TunerGP and the Drift Challenge. The TunerGP is a time attack for any kind of cars from tuners all over german europe and is meant to give them a chance to show what they can do. The Drift Challenge meanwhile has become one of the most well known drift events in europe.
Patrick Ritzmann was destroying tires by the wagonload.. he told me if it’s not gonna rain at the next event he’s gonna need to order another 50
While it’s not the perfect event to have endless drift sessions due to limited track time, it is most famous for the huge crowds it draws every year. This year’s event, that took place on friday/saturday a week a go, totally confirmed both of these atributes: friday was a very stressful day for all the teams, as three hours of practice, qualification as well as a top 32 where all cramed into one day.
A new appearance for me, Mirek Duda in his RB S14 looked very promissing. I heard he’s got some polish roots, maybe it really is genetic?
All of this took place on the eastern part of the Hockenheim GP course, which isn’t used by the TunerGP and doesn’t get quite the amount of spectators but is actually much more entertaining as a drift course (at least for us photographers, I’m not sure how the drivers see this but I tend to think that they’ll agree with me on this).
Benno Frieden in his pink M3 went balistic. I can’t quite decide whether I love or hate the wild scream of his monster.
After some discussions with the track marshalls who, as always, took some time to get used to the fact that we drift photographers prefer to stand pretty much on the track, rather than behind the walls, which at Hockenheim have a meadow about the size of a football pitch between them with the track also having Formula 1 races and all.
Alex Gräff in his E92 M3 got his dream final against Remmo Niezen but wasn’t quite able to beat him. Still, 2nd place!
I have to concede that we sometimes get a bit carried away in the hunt for the best spot and all of a sudden are standing a few meters from the cars. But I think with enough experience you can judge pretty well where a drift car is gonna go. Also, if a driftcar screws up, it usually either spins pretty much on the spot or goes to the outside.
One of the most professionally built drift cars in europe, Francesco Conti’s E92 is based on a GT4 M3 as I’ve heard. It just goes and sounds awesome!
We are usually standing at the inside of the exit of the corner, where a drift car can’t really go off to with a lot of momentum. Trouble is, F1 aren’t used to that and I get that. But it never takes very long for them to see that and so always a good compromise can be found. That’s it for the chapter on photographer’s safety. Got a bit carried away there. Oh crap, I’m standing on the track again.
Maybe the fact that I recently bought one myself has an influence there, but I just really like Marc Thill’s E36 wagon. There’s something very cool about a stealthy looking wagon going extremely sideways!
Anyway, saturday is the big day of the TunerGP/Drift Challenge. There are the TunerGP finals (unfortunately this everything went by in such a blurr with all the good friends that were to be found all over the place that I didn’t really see any time attack action..) and the big Drift Challenge finals. This used to be a competition but this year consisted just of show drifts for the big crowds in the famous Sachskurve. After that, there was as always the team drift competition for teams of 5 cars (amusingly enough, the drifters seemed to be a bit flustered by this „team competition“, because they did way better team drifts in the show part before that 🙂 ). Additionally, this year King of Europe did a exhibition Top 8 at the end of it all.
Getting stronger and stronger in his V8 E36 M3, Benjamin Boulbes finished first in the King of Europe Exhibition Match.
All in all, all the parts showed that wisefab is now on every car in all of europe. Almost. I’m not gonna go into details about who did what but will just let the pics do the talking (although I think I did a lot of this too..) but I’ll give you the results:
Drift Challenge: 1. Remmo Niezen (in his backup car!), 2. Alex Gräff, 3. Matt Carter
King of Europe Exhibition: 1. Benjamin Boulbes, 2. Francesco Conti
Team Falken as always put on a strong show, here it’s Lars Verbraeken, Remmo Niezen and Paul Cheshire doing the Sachskurve (with Matt Carter close behind).
Sorry if I got a bit carried away talking about first world photographer problems, but it’s called „photography friday“ after all 😉
Last pic of the day goes to the smoke machine of Patze Ritzmann. Thank god there was some wind!
Due to a deadline of a thesis approaching rapidly I haven’t been able to process many of my photos so there aren’t yet a lot more photos to be seen from this event on my page but be sure to check back later because they are gonna get done as soon as I’ll get to it! Oh but on the page the pics from this blog are larger and better and more of everything so check them out anyway! 😉 www.silverpics.ch
As always, don’t forget my facebook page.
Once every year, german car magazine Sport Auto organizes a huge event at the Hockenheimring, which includes the TunerGP and the Drift Challenge. The TunerGP is a time attack for any kind of cars from tuners all over german europe and is meant to give them a chance to show what they can do. The Drift Challenge meanwhile has become one of the most well known drift events in europe.
Patrick Ritzmann was destroying tires by the wagonload.. he told me if it’s not gonna rain at the next event he’s gonna need to order another 50
While it’s not the perfect event to have endless drift sessions due to limited track time, it is most famous for the huge crowds it draws every year. This year’s event, that took place on friday/saturday a week a go, totally confirmed both of these atributes: friday was a very stressful day for all the teams, as three hours of practice, qualification as well as a top 32 where all cramed into one day.
A new appearance for me, Mirek Duda in his RB S14 looked very promissing. I heard he’s got some polish roots, maybe it really is genetic?
All of this took place on the eastern part of the Hockenheim GP course, which isn’t used by the TunerGP and doesn’t get quite the amount of spectators but is actually much more entertaining as a drift course (at least for us photographers, I’m not sure how the drivers see this but I tend to think that they’ll agree with me on this).
Benno Frieden in his pink M3 went balistic. I can’t quite decide whether I love or hate the wild scream of his monster.
After some discussions with the track marshalls who, as always, took some time to get used to the fact that we drift photographers prefer to stand pretty much on the track, rather than behind the walls, which at Hockenheim have a meadow about the size of a football pitch between them with the track also having Formula 1 races and all.
Alex Gräff in his E92 M3 got his dream final against Remmo Niezen but wasn’t quite able to beat him. Still, 2nd place!
I have to concede that we sometimes get a bit carried away in the hunt for the best spot and all of a sudden are standing a few meters from the cars. But I think with enough experience you can judge pretty well where a drift car is gonna go. Also, if a driftcar screws up, it usually either spins pretty much on the spot or goes to the outside.
One of the most professionally built drift cars in europe, Francesco Conti’s E92 is based on a GT4 M3 as I’ve heard. It just goes and sounds awesome!
We are usually standing at the inside of the exit of the corner, where a drift car can’t really go off to with a lot of momentum. Trouble is, F1 aren’t used to that and I get that. But it never takes very long for them to see that and so always a good compromise can be found. That’s it for the chapter on photographer’s safety. Got a bit carried away there. Oh crap, I’m standing on the track again.
Maybe the fact that I recently bought one myself has an influence there, but I just really like Marc Thill’s E36 wagon. There’s something very cool about a stealthy looking wagon going extremely sideways!
Anyway, saturday is the big day of the TunerGP/Drift Challenge. There are the TunerGP finals (unfortunately this everything went by in such a blurr with all the good friends that were to be found all over the place that I didn’t really see any time attack action..) and the big Drift Challenge finals. This used to be a competition but this year consisted just of show drifts for the big crowds in the famous Sachskurve. After that, there was as always the team drift competition for teams of 5 cars (amusingly enough, the drifters seemed to be a bit flustered by this „team competition“, because they did way better team drifts in the show part before that 🙂 ). Additionally, this year King of Europe did a exhibition Top 8 at the end of it all.
Getting stronger and stronger in his V8 E36 M3, Benjamin Boulbes finished first in the King of Europe Exhibition Match.
All in all, all the parts showed that wisefab is now on every car in all of europe. Almost. I’m not gonna go into details about who did what but will just let the pics do the talking (although I think I did a lot of this too..) but I’ll give you the results:
Drift Challenge: 1. Remmo Niezen (in his backup car!), 2. Alex Gräff, 3. Matt Carter
King of Europe Exhibition: 1. Benjamin Boulbes, 2. Francesco Conti
Team Falken as always put on a strong show, here it’s Lars Verbraeken, Remmo Niezen and Paul Cheshire doing the Sachskurve (with Matt Carter close behind).
Sorry if I got a bit carried away talking about first world photographer problems, but it’s called „photography friday“ after all 😉
Last pic of the day goes to the smoke machine of Patze Ritzmann. Thank god there was some wind!
Due to a deadline of a thesis approaching rapidly I haven’t been able to process many of my photos so there aren’t yet a lot more photos to be seen from this event on my page but be sure to check back later because they are gonna get done as soon as I’ll get to it! Oh but on the page the pics from this blog are larger and better and more of everything so check them out anyway! 😉 www.silverpics.ch
As always, don’t forget my facebook page.