NG Road Racing Motorcycle Club

Cadwell Park

30 Aug 2020

Last weekend four of the Pistonclick team, cameras in hand were at Cadwell for the NG Road Racing Motorcycle Club weekend meeting. This was round one of three in their reduced championship for 2020.

Like a lot of motorcycle racing organisations CV19 has put the brakes on getting out on the track, but they are now in full flow with good number forming up on the start line, with almost 40 in the Motul FPR Suzuki UK Bandit Challenge race alone.

Honours were shared on Sunday in this race series with Harley Prebble on bike #2 taking the first race and James McHardy on bike #1 the second. 

Over the weekend there were races for just about every class of motorcycle. Japanese twins, Italian twins, 1300cc monsters all the way down to classic 125cc GP bikes.

These ex-GP historic motorcycles were joined on track by 350 and 250 TZ GP machines racing in a British Championship title, so as you can imagine there was some close and fast racing within the different classes. 

The sound of these pure race bikes and the whiff of two stroke oil always brings back fond memories from my youth. I was Moto GP champion King Kenny Roberts when I was tearing down my local back roads with my mates on my Yamaha, sporting a fetching red and white YPVS nylon jacket that offered zero crash protection. 

You are invincible when you are 18. I still have that jacket, it doesn’t fit any more but I’ve never got round to chucking it out, too many memories.

The two strokes were the machines that caught my eye when I was looking at the downloaded electronic programme a few days before the event, but I was to be distracted by some interesting machines on the day.

The main one was the Molnar Manx ridden by Richard Molnar in the EDP Open 500 & Mini Twins. This bespoke 499cc motorcycle is a Classic race replica built by Molnar who own the manufacturing rights to replicate G50, R7 and loads of other classic bike parts.

Boy, it was going well and looked and sounded great.

Photographic Post Script

So on to the photography. Our continual hunt around Cadwell for a different viewpoint due to our favourite locations around Hall Bends being out of bounds due to the CV 19 restrictions continues. 

This time we will be focusing on the Gooseneck and Mansfield complex. This is not a favourite location for the Cadwell regular spectator photographers as you are a quite far from the action and will need a long focal length lens.

You can get a good fast speed panning shot here but you can do that in a load of other locations that are much more user friendly to the photographer. However, this area has two things going for it.

The first is the speed, the second action. Two aspects of your automotive photography that you should be striving to capture in every single image you take. Just capturing a sharp, correctly exposed image is fine, but for a stand out shot you need speed and action. 

Around the Gooseneck and Mansfield complex this is quite easy and I’m not sure why there aren’t more photographers here. I bet there will be the next time I go. As the riders exit Chris Curve they are travelling at speed into the Gooseneck and the top riders will be pushing the limits of adhesion from the back tyre. 

This can result is some great action shots but it will all depend on the riders. Those playing it safe will not get you that action shot, so if you are at a club meeting you are looking at the top five to ten riders to deliver.

As the bikes are nearly head on, start with a very high shutter speed to freeze the shot. When you have a few keepers, start to reduce the shutter speed to get a bit of background blur.

Further down the track in the direction of travel is Mansfield. This corner you are almost looking down onto the riders which gives you a different set of pictures from the rest of the track.

I do like to fill the frame with colour which is unconventional in motorsports, but I like it and this corner gives you that opportunity.

Look out for those overtaking manoeuvres. This also ticks the action box, and watch out for those riders pushing the front on the approach to this corner. By that I mean going too fast. It’s down hill so can be misjudged, resulting in a crash. 

Talking of crashes to finish off and to emphasise that we don’t get it right every time, here is a selection of our not so good crash pictures from the weekend. It was sod's law that when I was doing my arty slow shutter speed captures, someone would bin it in front of me.

All the riders were fine and walked away and hopefully will be out at the next meeting at Castle Combe 26th - 27 September 2020 with the bikes repaired.

Until then Stay Safe, Keep your Distance and Capture the action.

You can see more of DEEGEE Motorsports Photography that featured in this report here.