VHRA Vintage Nationals Santa Pod
VHRA Vintage Nationals

Santa Pod

When your first experience of drag racing is the NHRA Mile-High Nationals in Colorado – temperature into the 90s and the sight, sound and smell of top line NHRA Top Fuel, Funny Car and Pro-Stock or the Gatornationals in Florida - then lil ol’ Santa Pod in rural Bedfordshire is a bit different – especially for the season opening VHRA Vintage Nationals.
Having seen Stefan Marjoram’s excellent photos of the VHRA racing on Pendine Sands on Flickr (look him up – he’s very talented), I was keen to see their hot rods in action and Santa Pod is just 40 minutes up the road.

I’d only been to Santa Pod once before for the FIA European Main Event a few years back – which was graced by a visit from Melanie Troxel, a winner in Top Fuel and Funny Car in the US. My abiding memory (photographically) on a grey day was the walls which restricted a full view of the cars in the nearest lane.
The Vintage Nationals are an all-together more relaxed affair with an open pits, a number of people in period style dress and a musical soundtrack on the PA of rock’n’roll and surf.

With no commentary or live results on the day, I’ve simply created an album to try to capture the look and feel of the event – on and off the strip. There’s notes for photographers below the album.
From the spectator snapper’s perspective, the first thing I noticed (after the default “ex-WW2 airfield turned into a motorsport venue” breeze) was that the strip was incredibly shiny when the sun was out. I’d not seen that on my previous visit due the overcast skies, but this time it really gleamed and gives a subtle, but effective, reflection.
The challenge of the walls remains for shooting from the public areas but the grandstand gives reasonably good viewing on the left hand side of the strip, while the grass banking on the right hand side seems to have been built higher since my last visit.
The relatively modest times for the hot rods and one old school dragster (engine in front of the driver / diff between the legs) of low teens seconds for the quarter mile and terminal speeds of around 100 mph meant that I could drop the shutter speed. I used a range of 1/250 to 1/125 on the day.
The close proximity of the strip, along with the pits and fire up lane behind the grandstand, means that there was no need for a big lens. I used the 24-120mm zoom to start with before moving to the trusty 70-200mm zoom later on.
It was all delightfully informal with drivers getting lots of runs for their modest entry fee. 

Later in the year, the VHRA have their time trials on the sand at Pendine, go up the hillclimb at Prescott and then it’s drag racing at Sywell. 
A trip to Pendine is on the bucket list but competing motorsport events mean that it will not be this year.
Thanks to David Harbey Photography for this article on the VHRA meeting at Santa Pod. Check out his Web page, Twitter and Flicker accounts to see more of of his work.

More information on the Vintage Hot Rod Association can be found here.
Share by: