Mad Noise In Long Beach

My bedroom looks like my old desk at Village Green. I've now got a new Mac, two hard drives and cameras snaking out of the back. Jasper and I have set up to edit the Drift Race footage at my place.

Long Beach was nuts. Drift Racing is a weird sport, invented by the Japanese some 20 years ago, they don't really race each other, just lead and follow, and try to slide round corners better and make more smoke than the other guy. As we arrived in the Aquarium car park, I caught my first whiff of the burning rubber, and heard the screaming of the engines - that thing everyone says when they first visit a motorsports event. The smell of burning rubber was something I was to get very well acquainted with over the 2 days.

The supercharged, stripped down, rear wheel drive cars are set up for sliding, and they scream and slide all over the place, even when parking. While waiting to race, they warm tyres up with figure-8s and doughnuts, by the end of the competition, the streets of Long Beach were obliterated with black oil-slicks of burnt rubber. Thick white tyre smoke billows out of the wheel arches as they wail round the corners of the drift circuit. It pumps into the driver's cabin. Rugged race gearboxes bang as loud as a backfire. They backfire a lot too. Drifting is just starting to get big in the US, and there's only two car companies sponsoring teams (Ford, and Scion, Rogue's team's manufacturer), so the line up was an odd mix of cars, pitting high-end sportscar R&D money, against Sam's Auto Spares of Anaheim's '91 Toyota Corolla, bodykit held on with green gaffa tape. But regardless of sponsor, all the drivers had stupid amounts of skills, sliding their cars round Grand Prix corners at 100mph, nose to tail with their competitor round their racing line, missing the concrete walls by mere inches. Nothing prepared me for the amount of rubber debris that would hit me in the face all day either.

It was really good to be given the chance to shoot this. The action was a challenge to shoot as well as being pretty cool to watch. As far as the event away from the racetrack went, it was like shooting any kind of event with one camera, where you're asked to cover as much as possible. Lots to see after the first hour and nothing to see after that. Lots of beefy cars, geeky motorsports fans and trashy models with straining silicon chests posing for paid pics with the former.

A Press pass got me onto the starting line to shoot the cars warming up, and taking off in pairs to record their best course times. The noise was insane. The start line was at the foot of a canyon of tall apartment blocks, carrying the rowdy impatience of a dozen supercharged road racers 30 stories high. The city setting of the race circuit was very cool. I kept feeling like I had raced this course in half a dozen computer games. Once I was past security, there were no restrictions on where I walked on the track, and it took a little nerve and a lot of trust as the cars screamed and slid and burnt their tyres out just feet away from me.

The closest encounter was yet to come, however. During the final races, I situated myself and the tiny HD camcorder in a press dugout, several feet of concrete block separating me from the track, right at the apex of the fastest corner of the circuit. The finalists were competing in pairs at this point, I had a wide angle lens on the front of the camera and was getting the best shots by extending the camera out on my arm, but still behind the concrete block. There was a double V8 scream, and in seconds, the two cars came sliding round the corner (at 94 mph I was later to find out). I held the shot as the second car parabola'd closer and closer to the wall. Closer, closer, closer. And in an instant, SMACK! The camera in my hand was struck by the car's spoiler and thrown back.

When the tyre smoke cleared and I realised I was still standing, the camera and chunky fisheye lens was still in one piece, barely a scuff on it. A piece of grey Team Hankook carbon fibre embedded in the lens housing bore the evidence - at that speed the car must have barely kissed the rim of the lens, it would have been a matter of microns, but still enough for the spoiler material to slice into the 0o.1mm wide gap between rim and glass. Straight away I was speechless, frozen to the spot and my first thought was about this kid and his shoe . A miraculous, incredible story and I would have had a hard time convincing people of it's truth, were it not for the fact I got it all on tape.

I didn't get to take many photographs and the video footage is taking a day or so to transcode. But here's Rogue's pictures of the day.