Writing a report for PistonClick - Snetterton Stages Rally

Report and images by David Harbey

18 February 2023

Round 4 of this winter’s Circuit Rally Championship took place at Snetterton recently. With a rather thinner entry than Brands Hatch I hoped to be able to drive in easily, MSV Season Ticket to hand. Errm, hold on, what’s this queue … I made it just in time for Car 1, Stage 1 at 09.00.

I thought it might be interesting to try describe how these reports are created. I suspect that most of the PistonClick contributors would rather work with pictures than words – it’s certainly true for me. Anyway, here goes.

Arriving home, the first task is to load up the day’s work on the Mac. I use two external drives – one for the working set of images, the other solely as back up. For the last few years I have only taken RAW images; with the back up drive, it means that there’s always an original file to go back to.

I then use Nikon NX Studio software to quickly review the images and pick out a few shots to post to the PistonClick and Circuit Facebook pages. I use Polarr – typically only for some cropping and tweaking of the image. Often that is simply to sharpen slightly, and lighten darkness and shadows – especially if it is cars running black wheels – I’m not a fan of black wheels, I’m afraid – on my cars or my images!

Although I have Affinity and, indeed, NX Studio as editing software, I tend to keep it simple. I starting using Polarr as it has a really easy way to add watermarks in batch.

Just occasionally I might take out an offending red wheelie bin at an MSV circuit – or, whisper it, a marshal who is just too bright and distracting in orange. That’s not to say we are not eternally grateful to the folk in orange for the sterling and invaluable work they do!

Sticking a few photos on Facebook, saying report to follow, is the easy bit ! Sometimes there is an easy and clear outline – if it’s the first time at a circuit or using new or different kit – then it is very much about where you went, what you did, what you saw and what images you captured.

We all have our own style – I don’t tend to focus on the results of the event– they are available online – rather I will give you an idea of where I stood, what images I captured and perhaps hints and tips for fellow spectator snappers.

My next task is generally to go through the images, looking more closely and selecting for such post processing as is required. These days I have a folder of output per event with a sub-folder “no wm” – as in no watermarks. These will be my long term edited images, which are then also batch saved by Polarr with watermarks in a sub-folder called “wm”.

These images will generally be loaded to Flickr for the wider world to view and form the basis of my PistonClick report. In time the “wm” sub-folder will be deleted to make best use of space on my external drive.

This is probably completely the wrong way round for writing reports – but I am a snapper not a journalist. For Snetterton, I am going to take you through my day. Reviewing the stage diagrams, which now seem to be generally available before the event, I wanted to spend some of the day round at Coram but the morning stages saw the cars using the access road as part of the stage exit so was out of bounds. More of that later then.

For the morning I parked up near the grandstand to shoot at the Brundle, Nelson and Bombhole corners. I started off with the 300mm prime.

The longish zoom was ideal for the shots at various angles at the complex, although I soon switched to the 500mm prime. Just occasionally, I would find myself closer than I would have liked, but the shorter, lighter Phase Fresnal lens comes into it’s own in these circumstances.

Shooting from near to the Bombhole with the longer focal length also allows you to be on a level with the car rather than looking down from the spectator banking.

The beauty of Brundle / Nelson complex is that you can also go much shorter on focal length as the cars run almost under your feet. Having swapped to the 70-200mm zoom, I also started to slow down the shutter speed with acceptable results.

Circuit rallies have the strange combination of cars going past every few seconds, but not always with other cars around them – it’s good from time to time when two or three cars are running close together on either their first, second or third time past you.

After the lunch break, the stages were reversed which opened up the access road to Coram, so I drove all the way round to the start line for circuit races. Regular readers will know that I like a good panning shot, blurry wheels and all. I was in heaven and – bonus - the cars were going the right way – from left to right in the image.

Keep the shutter speed low and grab a shot just as they start braking for the tyre wall chicane halfway down the grid. I didn’t see another spectator snapper on the south side of the circuit all afternoon. 

Hopes of some brake disc glow and exhaust flames as the dusk drew in were confounded by the smaller than expected entry so these will have to do. For the Escort, I had driven back to Coram which was used in two configurations in the afternoon.

Dust on the track, wheels off the ground and then braking for the tyre chicane towards the Bombhole all provided interesting images. The backdrop of fields and, on this occasion, a grey overcast sky are a contrast to busy backgrounds at many circuits.

To finish the day, it was back to the Bombhole for the cars coming the “wrong” way and to show there’s nowt wrong with an Escort being driven at speed !

Back to the article writing process; I select suitable images for the words and try to remember to save them with a PistonClick watermark and at 2000 pixels wide to ease the task of loading up to the website.

I will always choose a header photo at 3:1 aspect ratio and a footer photo – often of a car or bike heading away from the camera. And that’s about it !

By the way, the winners were John Griffiths and Emma Morrison in their Fiesta R5. Best in show for me though was Jack Tilburn / Jody Wilson in their Mk2 Escort.

There are more photos on my Flickr feed; should you be interested in this form of rallying, the remaining Circuit Rallies in the Spring of 2023 are: