I'm sure many of you out there are familiar with the famed Belgian race course Spa. It's played host to many great F1 battles over the years as well as countless other motorsports events. Well now you get to see what it's like to lap the circuit in a MINI Cooper S. Ken at MINI2 posted the following video of his MCS lapping the track (warning for dial-up viewers – the video is 26MB in size and is in Windows Media Format):
“My video starts just before turn 12, Fagnes. Keep an eye on the silver Porsche that overtakes me on the F1 front straight about a minute and a half into the video. We loop around the 170 degree hairpin (turn 1 – La Source), and he just rockets away down the straight.
Here is a map of Spa for reference sake.
I put in about 180 miles of training on Tuesday. I was wore out afterwards but satisfied with finally getting a good foundation from which to start to improve my lap times. My best lap time was 3:13.03 (Spa is 4.4 miles/7kms long). That's still a good 4-4.5 seconds off the race pace which makes me a distant backmarker, but Tuesday was only my second full day of track time at Spa and my first trouble-free day.”
<p>For more about the video and the team behind it check their website <a href="http://www.desmethracers.be/0.0.framemaster.htm">here</a>.</p>
<p>Loved the video. Does anyone know what the song playing in the background is?</p>
<p>I didn't even realize there was a song as it played silently for me. It's funny how MS Media Player on Mac OSX won't play all Microsoft's own codecs correctly! Oh well – with it silent I could better imagine the sound of the engine :)</p>
<p>Great video…it made me want to put my helmet on and go motoring! The song was annoying. The best part of the soundtrack was when the song got quiet and you could hear the engine noise and tire squeals.</p>
<p>Gabe, maybe you should just break down and buy a Windows PC…:D</p>
<p>Ha! I think I'll just stick to running Windows on my Powerbook with Virtual PC 🙂 BTW he said that the reason he put that music on there was that something had fallen in the car and was banging constantly.</p>
<p>gabe… you should try this player:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html" rel="nofollow ugc">http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html</a></p>
<p>this player plays almost any videocodec… hopefully this video, too.</p>
<p>I actually use that player all the time now. It's really a must have for OSX.</p>
<p>YEAH!</p>
<p>I can also recommend mplayer though…</p>
<p><a href="http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mplayerosx/MPlayerOSX2b5.dmg?use_mirror=umn
">/mplayerosx/MPlayerOSX2b5.dmg?use_mirror=umn</a>.</p>
<p>Thanks! I'll check it out.</p>