Morgan Park Rnd 5 ASBK 2023

I'd never been to Morgan Park before, so when I saw an email from MA saying my media application had been successful I thought to myself I don't remember applying for that. Anyway with the year I've had so far it's no wonder I'd forgotten about applying, I had applied for SMSP & Morgan Park at the start of the year.

I was tempted to give it a miss but then hatched a plan. I had recently changed jobs and work for the Brisbane office of my company. So I could fly up on wednesday night and stay at my bro's house, go to work in Brisbane office thur-fri then the track on sat/sun for the superbike racing, back to the brisbane office mon-tues and then fly home and it won't be in one big whirlwind trip where I don't have 5 seconds for myself. Good plan.

It was good to catch up with Dave and the family, we even went out on a short ride after work one arvo swapping between his R1, Desert X and Will's CBR500. Dave asked me what I thought of the tyre's on Will's bike. I said they were rubbish and he should get something better asap before he bins it.

Saturday morning came around and I was on my way out to Morgan Park. The drive out was interesting as I've never been put there before. The drive up through Cunninghams Gap over the great dividing range was quite spectacular. Morgan Park is at Warrick about 2-2.5 hours from Brisbane.

Arriving at the track and everything has gone digital, no paper passes anymore. So bring up the app on the phone with my pass wait 2 minutes for it to load as I notice there is 1 bar of signal here then proceed to enter and head straight for the media centre. They've runout of official media vests so luckily I have my own media vest. They know how many media are attending how can they then not have enough vests?

I'd taken the trusty D500 with the Nikkor 200-500mm F5.6 and my 2 Tamron F2.8, 24-70 and 70-200mm lenses. I'm still amazed with this 7 year old camera body. I hope Nikon make a Z mount mirrorless equivalent of this camera. I was a bit worried about taking as check on as the limit was 7kg and these were way over that but they didn't even check.

The crowd was very small on the saturday. Not knowing my way around this circuit I proceeded to go from pit lane around to the bridge at turn 3, then across to turn 7. We were in for a treat today as Garry McCoy was out here today alongside the 2 seater doing demonstration laps. He didn't disappoint either. Here's a couple of shots I got of Mr Squiggle at turn 

Anthony West ex-MotoGP has been doing the rounds in ASBK for the last couple of years and it was good to see him racing hard, elbow down.

Anthony West

Westy

I probably spent far too much time at each location looking to get some good shots, I tend to also take more than I need at times as well to make sure that I got the shot and they aren't all a blurry mess. Long way to come up here and get only blurry images. Some turned out alright I think.

With saturday over with it was back to Dave's for a few beers and review some photos only to find out he doesn't have an SD card reader and I didn't bring mine. D'oh.

On Sunday Dave & Will decided to come out to the track and watch the racing. They weren't disappointed as Troy Herfoss#17 Honda racing and Mike Jones#1 Yamaha Racing battled it out all race long swapping the lead multiple times. I decided I'd like to get shots of the riders on the grid and forgo getting a good position around the track. I can't be everywhere and the grid was a bit of fun to shoot.

Here's a few shots on the grid.

There's not much time on the grid, probably less than 5 minutes in total before the 3 minute siren blasts signalling everyone off the grid to racing can get underway.Then it was a mad scramble to get around to turn 3 to shoot the action. I stopped and had some lunch with Will & Dave at turn 3. There was a big crowd out here for todays races and they got some great racing too.

Here's a few shots from sunday's ASBK Race 1

Herfoss#17 & Jones#1

Mike Jones#1

Glenn Allerton#14

Herfoss#17 & Jones#1

Herfoss#17 & Jones#1

Josh Waters#21

Arthur Sissis#61

All up it was a good weekend away at the superbikes, got some good shots, had a good time with my bro and his family which happens far to seldom these days and got to work with my new work colleagues. I'm glad I did it. Till next time.