E40racer WTF?

A long time ago I was driving on the E40 motorway to work. I was driving my Alfa Romeo GTV, the weather was nice, it was only 6:30pm and there was almost no traffic. It didn’t take long before I saw 6500rpm in fifth gear. I overtook a Citroën Xantia, normally Xantia’s are driven very slowly by old men. This Xantia was driven by 2 not so old men and accelerated pretty fast trying to catch up with me. I later learned it was fitted with a V6 engine and hidden blue lights…

These days I still drive an Alfa Romeo, a diesel engined one. And I do my very best to stick to the speed limits. Never thought I would like cruise control but since it was fitted to my car as standard I have found it to be quite useful on long trips to Nurburg and Francorchamps. It’s great to get better mileage and keeps my right foot under control.

Photography

My older pictures were taken with a cheap Canon A80 digital camera. It’s a good point and shoot camera and even after more then 4 years of hard use and thousands of pictures it still works perfectly. But making nice and sharp action photos of fast moving objects like racingcars is of course not possible. So it was time to upgrade, in the beginning of 2007 I bought a Nikon DSLR. Many people warned me that taking motorsport photos is a very difficult task. Unfortunately they are right. After the first events I attended with my new equipment I was very disappointed with my photos. After spending hours of searching and reading on the internet to find the right settings for my camera I decided to buy a better and faster lens. Since then my pictures have improved quite a bit. Still there is a lot of room for improvement. I have also switched to taking pictures in raw format, this gives more possibilities to edit the picture, certainly if you get the exposure wrong. Since I’m no fan of that big software company in Redmond my options for a raw converter were limited. I finally settled with Bibblepro and am happy with the results, productivity and performance. Further editing is done in The Gimp, not that I do much photo editing. Taking over 1000 pictures in a day is not difficult on busy days at the Nurburgring. Most of the time I just convert all pictures to jpegs (1024 pixels wide) and watermark them with a shell script.

Car nut

I have been a car nut since I was a young boy. Around the age of 10 I bought my first model car, a red Lamborghini Countach. Not so much time later I started buying car magazines, mostly British ones. My favorite car magazine is Classic & Sportscar, I love Italian sports cars from the sixties and seventies. The most beautiful car ever made in my humble opinion is the Lamborghini Muira SV, I also love older race cars like the Porsche 917, 956 and 962. “In car 956″ is one of my favorite automotive DVD’s. I’ve been lucky to see some very rare and exotic cars over the years. I will never forget the day I saw a McLaren F1 parked in the pits at Spa. One of the rarest cars I have seen must be this long wheelbase Ferrari 348, the car was built by the Ferrari factory as a test mule for Enzo engines. The Nurburgring attracts visitors from all over Europe, a lot of them from the UK. And they drive some cars that we can’t buy in Belgium. The first Nissan Skyline I saw in the flesh was at the Nurburgring.