Modified Live Cadwell Park 

6 May 2024

I have been photographing and attending Modified Live for years, driving to the event in my car which I displayed on various local car club stands. This is the first year that l went as a passenger as my car is off the road having a bit of performance and restoration work done to it. This is basically what modified live is, a car show for modified cars. Shame I didn’t have one! Next year hopefully I will be back with my wheels.

Modified Live not just another static car show. There is also live track action going on throughout the Spring Bank Holiday Monday when Modified Live is held. Glorious sunshine greeted us as we entered Cadwell with no queue to speak of which was unusual. In previous years it has taken some late comers over two hours to get in, with adjacent fields used as overflow car parking.

I didn’t see any different traffic flows than the usual and there seemed to be a similar to slightly smaller crowd, or maybe we were just lucky when we turned up. Walking round the car club stands there seemed to be a few more cars than last year and of a good standard. There is the usual show and shine and super car stands that you get at every show. 

Usually, at Modified Live you get something a little different. Rally and the transformer cars and trucks from the film franchise have displayed in the past but there was nothing like that this year. Maybe I just missed it as I did spend a lot of my time trackside since I didn’t have a display car.

There were three main track based events, Time Attack, Drifting and the Racing Honda Championship as well as the cars on the super car display stand going round during the lunch break. The timetable had the three very different forms of motorsports mixed together so there was always something happening on track. First up Time Attack.

Time Attack a simple concept. Buy a car, turn it into a race car, don’t race it. Wait, what, don’t race it? Time Attack is not racing, it’s individual race cars trying to set the best lap time around the track so there is no racing but lots of action.

I remember years ago when Time Attack first started there was quite a buzz around the events as regular drivers took their cars on to the track to see who was the fastest. It was a natural evolution of street and then drag racing, but with corners. Actually, the first Time Attack events I went to had drag/sprint racing and motorsport gymkhana as well. 

But as with all things motorsports, money talks and there were those who had plenty of cash to splash and those who didn’t. The haves started to win, the have nots got disgruntled. It was during that era that I stopped going to these events. A shake up of the rules and different classes, eight in total, Classic and Retro to Pro Extreme, and 19 years later it looks to be back on track with quite a lot of cars competing at Cadwell.

These days I only see Time Attack when it is run alongside car shows. At Modified Live there were some very nice cars competing, with some good drivers not just behind the big power cars but in all classes. I enjoyed what was on show, but it’s not racing and as a motorsports fan that’s what I like.

You might be surprised to find that I enjoyed the drifting from the Drift Pro Championship more than Time Attack. Drifting is also not racing. It’s a motorsport that is judged using many different criteria, but mostly on the accuracy while powering sideways through corners at high speed while the driver remains in full control of the car.

The drivers use oversteer to get the vehicle to drift through a set of marked points called clipping points. These clips are smaller on the inside and larger on the outside of course, which can be up to a kilometre long. Amongst others, the judges will award points for the initiation, smoothness and commitment to the drift and deduct points for braking and missing the clips.

It’s interesting to note that drift cars can have brake lights on the front of the car so the judges, who are trackside can see if they brake. There are braking zones but outside of these, using the brakes will result in a points deduction. Also, spokes on the wheels are painted so you can see if the front wheels lock up, so with these and the clips it’s easy for the spectators to see who is doing well. 

The tight track at Cadwell looked to be challenging for some of the drifters, with a few taking to the green instead of staying on the grey. Catching the grass resulted in the marshals heading on to the track to clear away debris from the spinning wheels that strayed to the green stuff.

The spinning rear wheels can produce huge clouds of smoke on the grey stuff but this is not a criteria that is judged, it’s just a side effect. It does make for dramatic images, however, and is a crowd pleaser. Judging by the large numbers of spectators watching, it’s what they came for as the biggest cheers erupted when there was a lot of smoke, and was there a lot of smoke - sometimes too much!

I photographed the drifting at Silverstone a few years ago and after the first run you couldn’t see anything, just loads of smoke and no wind to blow it away. Thankfully we had a slight breeze at Cadwell.

The Honda Racing Championship is a standard club based race series that is for any Honda as long as it is fitted with a VTEC engine. We are talking about Integra and various models of Civic.

This obviously means different classes but there was some close racing with some evenly matched cars taking on the tight twisty Cadwell track. The race series was formed by the team at Time Attack and is following the same schedule of racing at car shows held at motor racing circuits. Tunerfest and Go Japan as well as the show season finisher Modified Live at Snetterton will host the Racing Hondas in a seven round series.

So to sum up Modified live, it’s whatever you want it to be - a static car show or a track event. You could spend your day at either and enjoy yourself as there is plenty to see. For me as a spectator photographer it has plenty of variety, with the highlight being the drifting. As there was plenty of practice, qualifying and racing you have the opportunity to leave the track and visit the show without missing much.

Photographic Post Script

There were three of us at this event, RPW Photography, myself and Georgie who is learning the art of motorsport photography. Last time out, Georgie was centre stage with her media bib at the Mablethorpe beach racing. For Modified Live she was given free reign with feedback back given throughout the day.

The light was quite challenging as some of the shots at Halls were taken in the morning shooting into the sun, not ideal! A polarising filter and metering off where the light was falling, and not off the subject, while locking the exposure helped. Later in the day the light was nearly perfect and I made the most of it, following the sun round the track and keeping it at my back.

When I talk about nearly perfect light there is no such thing, it’s what a photographer has to use at that moment in time. A light fog first thing in the morning might be perfect for that landscape photographer, but not so good for the motorsport snapper. Light is the most important thing in motorsport photography.

I have lost count of the times I have seen people wasting their time track-side by picking a location at the wrong time of day. On all of our track photographic guides there is a compass indicating sunrise and sunset, giving you a massive hint on where to go during the day. Keep the sun at your back and you can’t go wrong.

However, if you have to do a bit of contre-jour (shooting into the sun) as I had to at Hall Bends, there are a few things you can do to help get a decent picture. First, use a polarising filter. When rotated it selectively blocks certain lightwaves, reducing reflections and glare. At Halls, using a polarising filter turned the nasty silver track surface you get from shooting into the sun back to grey. 

The next thing to do is get your exposure correct. Shooting into the sun will fool your in-camera exposure meter, so take an exposure from the light behind you, turn your back to the sun, take a reading from a neutral surface and lock it in. I have mapped a button on the back of my camera, a Nikon D500 to lock the exposure.

Some cameras come with this button as standard. To map a button on a Nikon DSLR, Menu > Custom Settings > f Controls > f1 Custom Control Assignment > pick your button and function. Next time you are trackside and have tricky light you could try this technique.