I’ve been to yet another Mini-car-related weekend, last weekend. I find it great that the Mini community is so active, its almost every other weekend that I find a Mini show of some kind going on, if not even more. This one was Mini In The Park 2007, this year held at Santa Pod raceway.
I’ve been to Mini In The Park for a number of years, but never at Santa Pod. I’m not sure why they didn’t hold the event at their usual place in Oxford, but Santa Pod provided a brilliant (better) alternative.
We decided to camp overnight on Saturday night since it was such a long drive from the Portsmouth area, and by the time we got there it had been raining most of the day. The camp site was a mud pit, although this proved fun with the cars! We got totally soaked setting up the tents, this didn’t help after finding the one Amey and me were borrowing broke, but we eventually managed to get things sorted out.
The cars were looking proper rally-style with all the mud up the side. Really great fun, although Scott and Adam were told off after a while!
Anyway, our evening panned out well, mainly involving of beer, some live music, some dancing and more beer; that’s pretty much all I remember until the morning. As the norm goes with camping, we woke early to the sound of Mini’s driving around nearby and with a rather large headache.
Eventually we headed off to the trade stands and Mini club stands. I wasn’t planning on buying much, besides some fuel clips and connections to fix my small fuel leak, but I did stumble across a Mini Miglia air intake on the Mini 7 racing club stand. He was asking £30 for it when I saw it first, quite early in the day. It so happened that Adam went back later in the day to buy some more stuff for himself and managed to grab it for me for just £20. Well pleased with that since I’ve never seen them for sale before, plus it would be pretty difficult to make something similar from scratch. I’m hoping to put this to good use on my red Mini Miglia replica very shortly.
Anyway, after some more looking around and some lunch we headed to the drag race area where we found some Mini’s already doing the runs. It was interesting to see and hear the different types of Mini’s doing the run, from near standard 1.3′s, to 998 screamers, Miglia racers, Z-cars Mini’s and more, all producing different power and different times. The "fastest Mini in the world" was there too (A-series powered), which did a time in mid 12 seconds at 115mph. The Z-cars Mini’s were particularly interesting and certainly loud too, producing 10′s and 11 second runs – very fast indeed! Here’s some photos…
What turned up then was totally unexpected – a jet car! I’ve never seen one of these beasts in real life before, so this was a totally new experience for me. It arrived at the "Christmas tree" awaiting its run and noticed a number of people near us begin to back away since we were directly behind it. I was a little worried at this point, but stood there anyway, armed with my camera and my finger on the trigger!
The team of 5 people or so were doing various checks on the machine for a few moments, then the turbine began to whine and things got louder, warmer and quite windy, as you’d expect. It was like this for half a minute or more, then suddenly this massive plume of smoke came out of the jet and right into the small grandstand we were watching from. The smoke was really weird and lingered about for a while and it was near impossible to see anything when this smoke was around since it was that thick. I managed to grab some photos of the Funny Car before its run anyway.
The team eventually finished doing their checks and backed away from this beast. The turbine wound up even further, things got windier, even louder and even hotter. It was difficult to look directly at the back of the Funny Car since it was that hot, but my glasses and camera protected my face from the heat just enough for me to take some snaps. My camera was having difficulty with focusing, so I locked it off to manual focus and focused it the best I could.
The Christmas tree lights began to come on. It wound up even more. One orange light on, then the 2nd, 3rd, 4th. Green. And Bang, it was off!! And my God is it fast!!? I jammed my finger on the shutter button and did my best to keep it in shot, while also doing my best to remain on my two feet! And just six seconds later its done. 1/4 of a mile in a shade over 6 seconds, crossing the line at a blistering 272mph! Incredible, breathtaking – littrally! Just unbelievable! Here’s a photos…
All in all a really fantastic day, and weekend in general. My Mini made it there and back with no problems at all, besides losing a bit of oil – but then again what Mini doesn’t drop oil?
Mate, the photo of the red mini with the woman standing beside it and the jet car with the people fussing are probably the best two photos I’ve seen out of your camera. That is some superb work!
Wow, thanks Collin! I thought they came out pretty good too – it was bloody difficult trying to keep the camera in focus, the lens was having a grand time in the heat!
PS: the photo with the red car that you mentioned above is actually a pink Mini Miglia, driver Sarah Munns. Lovely car, great driver! I’ve yet to meet her yet though.