Kirkistown Irish Superbike championships
On Tuesday it was the latest round of the Irish Superbike Championships at Kirkistown Race circuit in County Down. The Weather forecast was for prolonged Rain but luckily it did not arrive until after the racing had been and gone.
Kirkistown is a very small, flat circuit with very few corners which makes it hard not to continually repeat shots that you have captured many times before. With the recent clamp down on Health and Safety at race circuits (fat lot of good its doing with racers still getting killed and spectators still getting hurt) it is getting even harder to capture anything worthwhile at this circuit. But with by utilising large glass and a tele-convertor its still possible to shoot some action.
The dedicated Medical Team do a great job of quickly getting to the scene of an incident and attending to the injured racers, here they can be seen in action attending to Jason Cash who luckily was not badly hurt in this crash. This incident happened quite some distance away from me but a 300mm Nikon lens and 1.7 tele-convertor helped me to zoom in on the scene for an image that the Medical Team were appreciative of.
I was down to a shorter lens and a very slow shutter speed ( 1/80th sec ) to capture some panning images when Scott Lonsdale crashed in front of me, sadly the shutter speed for panning images wasn’t quite fast enough to capture this crash any sharper.
Kirk Jamison and Gerard Kinghan are just Two of the many friends I have made through racing and although they are rivals on track they are also good friends off it, here they are locked in battle at Kirkistown. Sadly Gerard crashed out shortly after this and broke his Collarbone.
But Portadown’s Marshall Neill had one win and a runner-up spot, he would have had Two wins only a commentators cock-up on the number of laps remaining meant that his pit crew displayed the wrong info to him on his signal board allowing David Haire to win the second Superbike race. But Marshall still has a very healthy lead in the championship fight.
