For the entire 1999 and 2000 season, the site which the Phoenix region SCCA autocrossed at did not permit cameras. This resulted in having startling little to photograph since I'm not real big on going out of town to race these days. Fortunately, we are back at Firebird raceway now which permits the use of cameras. Look for new photos to be posted online over the 2001 season.

August 21 2005 - AZ Region SCCA Autocross at CAC: For the first time, I posted every picture I took at the event online. For any of you that actually thought I was a really good photographer, now you get to see how wrong you are! A lot of the pictures are blurry, out of focus, out of center, and have other problems but I figured since I shot nearly every car for two full groups I was better off just posting all of them than hand selecting just a few.

February 13 2005 - AZ Region SCCA Autocross at PIR: I didn't get too many pictures from this autocross, but it's been about 4 months since I've put up an autocross gallery, so I didn't want to go without putting any of the photos up at all.

November 7 2004 - AZ Region SCCA Autocross at Firebird: 15 select photographs from the overcast and partially wet course on this pleasant November day.

September 19 2004 - ASRA/NASA High Performance Driver Education: I was driving and passengering a lot at this event, so I didn't get to take tons of pictures, but I did get a pretty good amount, mainly of the drifting group. Since it was mostly novices just learning how to try and drift their cars, I decided to break this gallery up into "Grip", meaning normal performance driving, drift, spins, and understeer.

July 18 2004 - AZ Region SCCA Autocross at CAC: A very small gallery of 21 photos from this early morning autocross at the driver training center in Casa Grande.

March 9 2004 - NASA US Drift Practice: A gallery of the best photos from the Arizona NASA region's first US Drift Practice event. Held at Phoenix International Raceway, about 10 folks were the first to ever participate in a drifting event on the same famous road course you may have seen on TV for the Grand American races held there every spring.

March 7 2004 - Tucson Desert Drift: A huge, four-part gallery of pictures from the Tucson Desert Drift event at Tucson Raceway Park.

February 22 2004 - NASA HPDE: Some pictures of the February 22nd NASA HPDE groups out at Phoenix International Raceway. The morning groups were dry but cold, and by late morning the rain was really coming down, making for some nice drifting (intentional and otherwise) going on at the track.

February 14 2004 - AZ SCCA Solo2: Just a quick gallery of 30 selected photographs from the Valentine's Day Autocross.

January 31 2004 - ProAutosports: Mainly pictures of Brady and Pat's cars at this Firebird main course event, but there's some other cars thrown in there as well.

January 24/25 2004 - SCCA National Tour: I only showed up for the last run group on each day, so it's not too many photos, but the ones that I did get are pretty decent.

November/December 2001 - R/C Car racing with the BCR crew: In absense of me doing much of any real racing or autocrossing thanks to not having a working transmission in my hatchback, I decided to highlight the BCR R/C car team.

October 4th-7th, 2001 - The 2001 Prescott Forest Rally: A somewhat large collection of pictures from the 4th through 7th while we were in Prescott watching and participating in the 2001 Prescott Forest Rally.

May, 2000 - Del Sol club and Sierra Vista autocross: Mostly just a random assortment of photos from the AZ Del Sol club mountain drive and the Sierra Vista autocross in May, 2000.

March 18/19, 2000 - Viper Days at Firebird: After almost a year of not taking my car out on the open track, I got a chance to run with the Viper Days club on Firebird's "Indy" track. This course is almost never used by any of the local clubs so it was a chance just too good to pass up.

January 8/9th, 2000 - NASA at PIR: Still not eager to stuff my car into a wall at PIR, I attended both days of the NASA event in January to shoot pictures mainly for a couple of the guys I know, Chris Brinson of HondaPrelude.com and Tage Evanson, one of the regular autocrossers. Lots of cool pictures from this event.

November 27th, 1999 - NASA Race at PIR: Only a week after shooting pictures and video at Firebird Raceway, Tage and I head to PIR to see what the valley's other racetrack is like. Again, I just took pictures and got in-car video in Tage's car. PIR was a much better track to be taking pictures from though, so the shots here came out even better than the ones I got at Firebird.

November 20th, 1999 - ASRA Race at Firebird: After a few months of scheduling conflicts, I finally made it to one of the local track events, this one being hosted by a group called ASRA. As much as I wanted to get out on the track myself, I decided to just observe for a few events before possibly risking my daily driver. So, when the ASRA race at Firebird came around, I decided to loan my video mount to Tage so he could get video racing his Integra while I just took pictures from the stands.

September 25th 1999 - Cactus Corvair Club Autocross: After a long summer of no autocrossing, I came back ready to dominate the local scene on my new Kumho race tires. I had scored a very well in June on these tires, so I fully expected to do well at all future events. Boy was I wrong. After doing pretty so-so at the September 12th SCCA autocross I was more than eager to get in some more practice. The Corvair Club autocross was just the ticket.

July 24th & August 21/22 1999 - Willow Springs Raceway: Although I went to Willow Springs twice this summer, I never actually got any pictures of my car out on the track. I took my Civic in July and do have some in-car video of the event. In August, I ran in a borrowed Toyota Supra turbo along with the owner. I did get several good pictures of some of the other cars, and of Supra's owner out on track.

June 12th, 1999 - Open Track at Buttonwillow Raceway: This was the first time I'd ever "raced" on a road course before. Sure, I'd done all these autocrosses, but navigating through some cones at 25-50mph is nothing like blasting through a real road course at more like 65-95mph. I never spun out, but I had my share of minor off-track adventures. For the most part, it was a terrific event, and I'm already dreaming up ways to acquire a fast but cheap racecar now.

March 28th, 1999 - Autocrossing in Tucson: It had been a while since I'd gotten down to Tucson for a race. It's about a 2.5 hour drive away, but they do allow photographic equipment there. That didn't used to matter, but the current Phoenix region site doesn't allow any cameras now. Since I wanted to try out a new video setup as well as take some still photos, it was on to Tucson. I'm still getting used to doing action photography, but this set it a very large one, and the pictures are vastly improved over the December Tucson event.

January 23rd, 1999 - C5 at the NSX run: Well, I don't really have any commentary for this area other than to describe it as what it is; a collection of pictures from a run to Bartlett Lake and back in a nitrous-injected Corvette C5 with a local NSX club. Does it get any better than this? The astounding part here is that I finally got some really good pictures of a very nice NSX and my brother in law's C5 in motion with that spiffy-cool motion blur effect I'd been unable to do with my old Pentax camera. Score one for Nikon's awesome N90.

December 20th 1998 - Autocrossing in Tucson: Ok, so I was just really itching to go racing ASAP and the next race was in Tucson. Tucson's something like 110 miles from my house, so this was just a little bit of a problem. The solution? Only get 4 hours of sleep and leave at 5am in order to get there in time for registration at 7. The race stank, but there's at least two good pictures from this somewhat abbreviated section.

November 22nd 1998 - Autocrossing at Firebird: This was my first attempt at racing photography. There are some pretty good pictures here, although at the time, I just simply could not get any kind of motion blur at all. Especially compared to what I was able to get under similar conditions with the same camera a month later in Tucson. However, I did go into all kinds of detail in this section about everything not to do in order to take good pictures.

All pictures and text Copyright 1998-2004 Brandon Smith.
Commercial reproduction without express written consent of the author is prohibited.
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