Gallery Flashback.
Malaysia 2015 - Explosive for so many reasons
In 25 years photographing MotoGP, by far the most incident packed Grands Prix I covered was the Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang in 2015.
Of course, it is most famous for the Rossi/Marquez incident and I'll cover that in a future article. But, for me, there was another incident which made quite a significant weekend.
It was my first experience of a far eastern 'fly away' race so, as was often the case when visiting new tracks, I was looking forward to it more than usual. My main reason for venturing outside Europe was to cover Danny Kent's Moto3 title challenge.
Yes, that was 11 years ago!
On the Friday afternoon MotoGP session, I was with several other snappers at the favoured spot of outside the last corner. A classic Sepang shot with riders passing the famous 'birds nest' grandstand in the background.
However, from this spot, you also have an excellent shot of riders passing through the fast turns 9 and 10 and is really good for 'panning shots' (following the subject side on with a very slow shutter speed to give a 'fast blur' effect in the background).
Unfortunately, being on a slow shutter speed was the worst camera setting to be on for what was about to happen. I always shoot with both eyes open, so I can see if anything else is happening outside my viewfinder where, on this occasion, I was focusing on a rider passing through these turns.
Suddenly I noticed a glow in my left eye and quickly aimed my lens towards it.
Jack Miller had lost control of his LCR Honda and the initial impact had ignited the fuel tank.
Even though my settings were not ideal, the following few shots were spectacular;
As The Honda settled in the middle of the track, still in flames, and red flags were being waved everywhere, I looked round at my fellow snappers who were all still trained on the final corner.
"Did anyone see that?' I enquired and none had but quickly trained their cameras on the aftermath.
Once you know the rider is OK, as Jack was in this case, there is always a certain pleasure in capturing an incident, knowing you were about to be rewarded for your efforts. Knowing you are the only snapper to capture the shot is even better as you will suddenly become incredibly popular in the media centre.
In those days, I was also supplying Getty Images and the sequence featured on their 'Image of the Day' section. Not only that, the TV cameras had failed to capture the crash so the only images available were mine. For two days my fireball images were being published and shown on TV everywhere.
This was the story of the event.
Then Rossi and Marquez started racing close together. Very close together.
And suddenly there was a different story.
