I arrived at the track at 10am and still being a guest of Red Bull in their Paddock Club suite headed there for the morning garage tour. There we watched Max Verstappen prepare to go out for some laps in the Red Bull machine. What strikes me when watching all this is just how calm everyone is.
The whole testing thing is super secret though so there are no photos in the garage and screens are used to shield the car from those outside whenever the car is stationary, we are also warned repeatedly that we’ll have photos deleted if we take them inside the garage so that criteria is observed.
After the tour I headed out with a couple of cameras and thankfully found the complimentary shuttle vehicles that runs photographers around the inner and outer roads that run around the main track.
In the stadium section I found an opening that allowed me to shoot low and across some flowers and played around with some shots there for 45 minutes. I was thrilled to have the whole section to myself.
The stands were largely empty but there were still many photographers peppered around the track trying to find an interesting angle.
After the day’s testing most of the teams hold press conferences where their driver to team boss reports on the day’s events. This is
Here Sergio Perez briefs the media about his day on the track. There are only 10 cars out each day
Fernando Alonso looked more like a movie star than an F1 driver as he fronted the TV crews.
Here the car slips off the track for a second or so and raises a dust cloud behind it.
The laborious job of scraping off dead rubber from the tyres is handled by one of the pit crew.
Here I found some tyres to shoot through for an interesting effect.
The Red Bull in Max Verstappen’s hands flies across the start/finish line at 250km/hr. I needed a shutter speed of 1.8000th of a second to stop the action and even then there is still a little blur.
I found it interesting that focusing on the tyres, they are not in fact round when at high speed, instead they are more of an ellipse. 
Using a slow shutter speed of 1/60th of a second and panning the camera as Lewis Hamilton passed, allowed me to blur the background but keep the car sharp.
Daniel Ricciardo’s Red Bull team mate Max Verstappen heads away from the signing session which tends to degenerate into pushing and shoving between the punters, many of whom are not even Red Bull guests but simply get wind of the session and gate crash it much to the disappointment of the Red Bull crew charged with running the session. Here, Max heads back to the calm of the Red Bull hospitality suite where he dines with the crew, sponsors and people like me who’ve paid to be a team guest for the day. 
