Last year in May, I felt the urge to see a real Indycar when Indy qualifying came around. I packed my trusty old Nikon and drove the 330 miles down to Speedway, Indiana. I arrived at the huge facility at 6:30am in the midst of a heavy rainstorm. Then I waited for 8 hours before the track was finally dry and the first engine fired! WOW! ... I was so impressed, I had to return the next weekend to see how the Penske story unfolded...

I lucked out and got a free pit pass through David Wrinkle (THANKS, BUD!), which gave me a chance to shoot some really close up stuff in pit lane as Team Penske struggled. This material became my first Indycar coverage to be published - American Racing Scene featured several galleries of my Indy qualifying shots. I followed up in Milwaukee with another set of images, and since then my "career" as Indycar photographer has gone into high gear. At Detroit, I was starting to get serious - hauling the big camera gear with me for the first time. Access was limited (thanks to Brian Wong for the free tickets and help!), but the good cameras and a little imagination helped me to get a pile of superb images.

Shortly after Detroit, I was contacted by a foreign magazine to help them get their Malaysian-language racing magazine off the ground later this fall. By the time Elkhart Lake came around, I was considered official media, and had the access a race fan can only dream of! The images I have been able to capture since that day are now featured on many web pages, including American Racing Scene, @ The Track with Galles Racing International, and finally, my own brainchild project, the Mobil 1 Live pages.

1996 is starting with my direct involvement as a primary partner of SpeedCenter Internet Publishing. SpeedCenter is a new site, dedicated to bring online-Indycar publishing to a new level. We joined forces with TV's "Voice of Indy Car" Paul Page, allowing us to operate like "real media", while giving Paul a chance to move to a new medium - the internet. For my latest work, keep an eye on that site!

I have to express my biggest thanks to Walt Baranowski, who between his own photo expeditions allows me to use his professional camera gear. Without his superb optics and zippy autofocus cameras, I would still turn in grainy, fuzzy images like those I shot at Indianapolis. The film scanner and CPUs to get this online is what I use every day at work - a few nice Macintoshes with the best scanner I have ever used, and since it is my regular job to know that kind of stuff, my scans should really be as good as they can be done :-)