Day out at the Red Bull Air Race 2007 London
January 3, 2008
More old photos and more old news but an entry nevertheless:
My brother and I enjoyed the Red Bull Air Race on Sunday 29th July 2007. We were up at the crack of dawn, missed the first train out of Edenbridge so drove to Redhill to get up to London. Tube was fine and we found it to be fairly quiet when we first got there (35k turned up in the end, they say). We had bought standing tickets on the South of the river where we could see the end of the ‘track’ and a big screen showing the whole thing.
The day was good but not great. The racing itself was something else (boy do they get low on the river, one of them was supposed to have been 3-4 metres above the water!!). It was excellent to see the light aircraft race down the Thames, flip over and race back up it while dodging the ‘bollards’ or whatever they call them. But the let downs were the commentators who were an American and an over-the-top extreme sport junky Englishman. They just talked and talked and a lot of the time it was rubbish. The music from their so-called DJ was lousy at best and there were huge delays in between each stage, for example. the 12 pilots went out just before 11am as a sort of time trial to kick out 4 of them. This was 1.5 hours, then came at least an hour break (yes of commentary and very little else). They played clips to explain the race and the history, which was fine, but some of the clips were repeats, e.g. a John Travolta clip was played at least 4 times that we saw. There was no indication of when the next stage was starting and they didn’t really lay out the day well (ie. what was going to happen after the prize-giving at 3pm? No idea but it was supposed to be open till 5pm). OK, there were the Red Devils and 2 different helicopters performing some amazing moves in the breaks but the event needed a lot more going on. And they just didn’t have enough food stands, we queued up for burgers for about 25-30mins!!
It wasn’t too crowded, we found it fairly easy to walk about and the weather was good, luckily the expected rain had come overnight. The location was good, the banks of Greenwich are sloppy or had steps so you could see over people in front of you OK.
£30 for a ticket I suppose is cheap-ish in this day and age and paying an extra £10 for a grand stand seat wouldn’t have made much different but it’s high in my book. Shame also that the mass exodus of people was not well organised by the police at North Greenwich underground station. We went around one side of station to get in, stood there for 10mins before they decided to tell everyone that this is an exit only and we needed to go back round the other side. Hey guys, perhaps put up a sign and communicate that we wouldn’t get in this way. I hope they use these events for training for the Olympics in a few years, boy do they not want to screw that up.
I recommend it for a once-off but I’d probably won’t go again if it comes back to the UK.
Check out the site anyway:
redbullairrace.com
Oh and we had an Englishman in the final but sadly lost, tsch. 
More photos are here.
.kol tregaskes.photography site: squashyfrog.com
.photography blog: blog.squashyfrog.com
.flickr photostream: flickr.com/photos/koltregaskes
.deviantart gallery: koltregaskes.deviantart.com
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