You ever see a photo of a pair of Aston Martin race cars screaming down the track, and you wonder "how did they get that shot? Did they strap a guy to the wing of a third race car? Is that definitely what happened?" Well, no. That's not what happened. But they do let a guy hang out the back of a minivan at 120 MPH.
And the whole time, a pair of angry Aston Martin V12s buzz, whine, and growl at you like a pair of ticked-off dogs.
You're also probably wondering what sort of safety constraints there are for the photographer, hanging out the back of a minivan at 120 MPH. But I'm left wondering why you're wondering that, because having one's body mangled by a pair of incredibly gorgeous V12 race cars is a glorious death.
Commenter , who says that they're the driver of the van, popped in to give us some more details swirling around their own "120 MPH" claim:
I'll post something here to hopefully clear some things up:
I was the guy driving the van. It was a Dodge Caravan, if I remember correctly. I was planning on using one of our other vans, but they weren't at the track yet. The vans are good because they have that deep seat storage/grocery well thing in the back which allows for our photog to get nice and low and (relatively speaking) safe. And it had 1/32 tank of gas and a tire pressure light on. Recipe for success.
Now, to quell the naysayers and trolls: I am well aware that the 2014 Dodge Caravan is governed at 113 mph. This would make my egregious claim of 120 mph completely false and erroneous. We may not have hit 120 mph exactly. I used that in my Reddit title post (where I assume Michael (and the rest of the world) grabbed it) to sensationalize it a bit. I do know that driving on the banking with a (awesome pro) photog (named Brian Cleary hanging out the back, and three other crew guys handling communication and coordination is scary to say the least. That van was not built to be on the banking and the faster I got it the more stable it felt. I know I hit the limiter more than once (which has issues of its own), and in my few glances down at the gauges it looked near 120. Sorry if it's not GPS confirmed. You ever driven on the banking at Daytona in a rental van or a racecar? No? Ok then. Trust me (I've done both), it's scary. It's scary when you're by yourself in a purpose-built racecar and it's even scarier when you're responsible for the lives of four other souls and driving a van more suited for the grocery store than the banking at Daytona. But we do it because it's fun and because we could all be working boring jobs somewhere else but we choose not to. This is part of racing and we do it for all of you - the fans.
As any good photog will tell you (and some have here), you need actual speed to convey a sense of reality, depth, and speed to the pictures. Wheel spin, the track surface, the walls, the sky through the catch fence, etc. can all be shopped, but where's the fun in that? And it doesn't look as good, anyway.
This was super early in the morning on the Sunday of the Roar testing in early January. Three laps total. We were slower through the infield but flat out on the banking and straights. The bus stop was interesting.
It was a great experience and we had some fun doing it. I'm glad a "behind the scenes" video got so much attention. Anything we can do to help the fans, we will. I wish we would've had a GoPro on one or all of the cars. Next time.
Here is our full photo album from both the Roar, the Rolex 24, and most of our races and events from 2014 through present. and the password to download any/full resolution is Vantage007. There are some truly desktop-worthy images in there.
Feel free to shoot us an email if you'd like - we'd love to hear you comments, suggestions, etc. [email protected] You can follow us on all our social media and whatnot, as well - I won't publish that here, as it's easy enough to find and this isn't the place for shameless self-promotion. We do contests and giveaways and other fun stuff from time to time on there, so look us up.
Thanks for watching the video, guys. Let us know if you'd like more of this stuff in the future!
And yeah, we'd love more stuff like this in the future!