So, more in the ‘what have you been up to?’ segment…
The past couple of summers, I’ve been to a couple of major RC (radio-controlled model) car racing events around Europe, so I’ve been doing a little extra travel as a side-job and reporting for a site called RCRacing.TV
Basically this entails taking pictures, talking to the top drivers at each event, doing various race reports and posting the reports and pictures online. Pretty geeky, yeah, and very few people realize how seriously many of these racers take their racing – most of them pay hundreds of (pounds, Euros, whatever) to drive or fly hundreds of (miles, kilometers) across the continent to race in front of very few spectators for no other glory than to try to do better than they did last year. Those that haven’t paid their way are there because there are companies that actually sponsor them (with money!) to do well and promote their products – the top guys are actually paid a salary to race toy cars for a living – and if the sponsored guys don’t do well, they know their sponsors might be tempted to look elsewhere when their contract is finished. So there’s a lot of pressure involved and it usually means some good racing.
This year I was asked to try to do race commentary, which, if you’ve watched motorsports before, consists of some guy who thinks he’s a know-it-all about the race and the drivers (‘some guy’ being me in this case) and babbling over the practice, qualifying heats and races. It was my first time doing it at the European Championships for electric buggy (there being two classes: 2WD and 4wD), then the following week I was scheduled to announce for the Championships for the much larger and cosmically faster 1/8th scale on-road class.
Here’s the race edit of just the fastest 10 guys (the A Final) in the 2WD electric buggy, with my commentary (the other voice you’ll hear is my friend and colleague during the trip, Mat):
The way these electric buggy races work is the top 10 racers race 3 times, and the finishing order over the 3 races determine the overall winner. So it’s not just a matter of winning the first race – ideally you want to win two races so there’s no doubt who the winner is!
This next set of Final races are the top 10 4WD buggy racers, featuring most of the same drivers that were in the 2WD Final:
The 4WD Finals were much more exciting because the guys you expected to do well didn’t!
And the last video is an abridged version of the 45-minute Final race for the 1/8th Track IC (Internal Combustion) European Championships, which was much harder for us to film and commentate on because these cars move at up to 65 mph at the end of the straight and change position so fast on the track that the numbers are nearly impossible to read…as you can tell from the video below! (I also had no window to see outside our ‘media centre’, as it were, which made it even harder)
So that’s another little taste of what I’ve been up to the last couple of years…
Let me be frank! 