GT Media Day - Donington Park - 12 March 2024

The British GT Championship held its media day last Tuesday at one of my favourite tracks in the UK, Donington Park. Usually there would be a gathering of PistonClick photographers at this event as it’s one of the first track based events of the year.

Also Donington is a great location being in the centre of the country, so it would have been great to catch up with my friends and fellow motorsports photography enthusiasts after the long dark winter.

Unfortunately I was the only one to make it trackside due to the guys and girls having other commitments. I should have been a little disappointed as I was looking forward to meeting up but it did give me the opportunity to plan my day with no agenda, arriving and leaving when I wanted to.

As the weather was not good on Tuesday I decided to arrive late and timed it perfectly. The rain had stopped and didn’t start again until I was about to leave. The GT Media day only has two highlights that the spectator can access so I wasn’t missing anything being late.

The tracking event was the first one. This has all of the cars on track lined up behind a lead vehicle being videoed and photographed by the GT media crews for the season to come.

Even though PistonClick is a media outlet we try not to get involved on the track side of the fence, preferring to comment about motorsports events from the spectator’s view point. So I picked the grandstand on the main straight to view the spectacle, as did quite a few other fans.

The grandstand gives you great views of the start line, pit garages and the pit slip road, so is a good location to view the action and take the odd snap to two, and as a bonus it is covered from the elements.

The tracking event saw the cars line up behind a lead vehicle and slowly drive round the track. As the cars were captured they sped past the tracking vehicle to let the next cars close on the cameras, entering the pit lane which is just in front of the grandstand.

As the last cars came in I headed to Cafe 39 which was where the next and final event was due to take place, the pit walk.

This would be the first and probably for most of the fans, the only chance to get up close to the cars in their new livery. And what a great set of cars there were! Mercedes-AMGs, Aston Martins and Lamborghinis were parked up for the fans to get a closer look.

I photograph a lot of motorsports events and I must say that the GT Championship has some of the best turned out cars in the UK. Mind you there is a saying that you could put a supermodel in a bin bag and they would look good, and there is some truth in that statement. It’s quite hard to make a Lamborghini look bad. 

A few of the drivers were making themselves available to the fans, but only a few. I think the organisers have missed a trick here. A media day is where you launch the season champions to the world. The accredited media will capture the event and do what they do but every fan who turned up, and there were a lot of them, has a broadcast capable video and stills camera in their pocket these days.

So it would have been nice for some of the fans to get a few more photos and selfies with the drivers, which would have been posted up on social media within seconds of being taken. This is free publicity for the championship season to come and for the sponsors, and it also reinforces the fans’ support for the teams, which can’t be a bad thing. 

Jessica Hawkins was one of the drivers who did meet the fans. She will be driving an Aston Martin Vantage GT3 alongside Andrew Howard, making her British GT debut with the Beechdean AMR team. She was a proper trooper, hanging around in the cold and damp pit lane chatting to the fans for quite some time.

All too soon the tannoy burst into life and we were asked to leave. I could have spent a lot longer checking out the cars as it’s not every day that you get to get up close and personal with these beasts.

However, I had the rest of the afternoon to watch them out on the track which I was looking forward to, so after grabbing a few last shots I headed for the exit.

There were a lot of cars to capture trackside, 19 GT3 cars and 17 GT4s, making up a grid that will be one of the biggest for years. Unlike some UK race series the British GT Championship seems to me to be growing in popularity. I loosely base this unsupported statement on the maxed out grid and the number of spectators that turn out to watch on a cold, wet Tuesday.

I have been going to the GT Championship media launch day for years, and last Tuesday was the largest crowd of spectators I have seen at this event. There will be no way to substantiate that statement with numbers. This was a free to enter event, there were no ticket sales and no one at the entry gate at Donington, just a few guys directing the traffic. So putting a total attendance figure on the crowd would be difficult.

But looking at the crowd and the grid walk it was be a substantial number, which bodes well for the season ahead.

To reinforce that statement and confirmation of the growth of the GT Championship, most of the coming season will be broadcast live on the Sky Sports F1 channel. This is great news for the sponsors and teams and the fans who can’t get to every event. I however, when I’m able, will be trackside as there is no substitute for live, loud, lairy GT track action.

If you would like to see the GT cars, your next opportunity is the first round at Oulton Park on 29th March-1st April. However, there is a private test day scheduled for the 19th of March at Oulton which might include some of the cars competing this season. I would recommend you check with the circuit before setting off, a guide to taking photos at Oulton can be found here.

Photographic Postscript 

For this event I decided to go with a lightweight camera setup. My default for Donington is a big, heavy lens as some of my favourite places to take motorsports photography here are a long way from the action. These locations are at the far end of the track, Coppice and McLeans. These are great spots for capturing the action, but I didn’t visit these locations last Tuesday, 

only having a short lens with me.

The Nikon D500 (APS-C) with a AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E FL ED VR and a 1.4 and 2.0 teleconverter was used for the track action. The 2.0 teleconverter was only used at Redgate, most of the shots are through the wire. The slowest shutter speed I managed that had acceptable sharpness for me was 1/50 sec (shown below), most of the others were 1/160-1/250 sec at 300+/- mm focal length hand held.

Nikon D500 with a AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E FL ED VR and a 1.4 teleconverter. ISO 100 Focal length 262mm -0.3EV ƒ8 1/50s.

Auto focus was set to group with nine points. I did experiment with 3D which works well even in the low light conditions, but the focus point does jump around on the subject and I find that a distraction.

Nikon D500 with a AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E FL ED VR. ISO 125 Focal length 200mm 0.0EV ƒ6.3 1/320s.

The cheap as chips kit lens AF-S DX NIkkor 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR was used for the grid walk and portrait shots. I do have a few Pro f2.8 short lenses, but keep coming back to the NIkkor 18-140mm because it’s lightweight and has a convenient focal range.

I will be using the same kit at our next event, the Rally Stages this weekend at Donington, where hopefully a few more PistonClickers will help me out with images for the report.

Nikon D500 with a AF-S DX NIkkor 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR. ISO 500 Focal length 183mm 0.0EV ƒ8 1/320s