Auto Club Speedway hosted the HSR West 11th Annual Historic Sports Car Festival this weekend for two days of vintage and historic racing in the SoCal sun.  HSR West was running 10 run groups this weekend:

• Group 1 – Formula Vee
• Group 2 – Small & Medium Bore Production
• Group 3 – Formula Ford Pacific
• Group 4 – 2.5 B-Sedan
• Group 5 – BOSS, Formula 5000, & Formula 2.0
• Group 6 – Historic Stock Cars
• Group 7 – Big Bore Production
• Group 8 – GTP, Trans-Am, Can-AM, & FIA
• Group 9 – Champ & Indy Car
• Group X – Datsun-Nissan

HSR West ran a quality event with an open paddock, an entertaining race announcer, podium celebrations, and generally a really friendly atmosphere.  The luxury box seats on the inside of the main straight were open, and some folks brought their portable party along.  Add in dignitaries like Adam Carolla, a passionate historic Datsun racer, and Tony Adamowicz, the Trans-Am, Can-Am, Formula 5000, and IMSA veteran along with beautiful weather, and we had a recipe for some good old fashioned – literally – Southern California racing fun.  Tony Adamowicz also has a long association with Datsun-Nissan and Riverside International Automotive Museum, who had a big celebration event earlier in the week.  Being here with the HSR West crowd around all these historic race cars made me think of what it must have been like at Riverside or even Ontario back in the day.  Unfortunately I wasn’t here back then…

All pictures in this gallery were taken with a Canon EOS 40D; most were shot with Canon EF 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L IS USM Telephoto Zoom Lens for Canon SLR Cameras.

I also recently bought a new SanDisk Extreme Pro CompactFlash 16 GB Flash Memory Card SDCFXP-016G-X46,Black because my old card with a 30 MB/s write speed could not continuously keep up with the 6 fps of my Canon 40D.  The new card was fabulous; I could hold the shutter release down essentially indefinitely without the card slowing down my shots.  A really important consideration when shooting live action sports.