"The Viper Showdown" Indianapolis Motor Speedway 2022 pics

[Schen]

Hi!

As you may know, many of us made the trek to Indianapolis Motor Speedway last week for "The Viper Showdown", a follow up to the Viper Racing League's reunion event at Road America. When the event at IMS was announced I was immediately on board to be there and photograph it. The Showdown was an incredible event! I have to thank Robert Strickland for getting myself the hook up with the track for media credentials. Lucky me got photo vest #14 and if you know your Indy history, #14 is quite the historic number. I ended up leaving the place with well over 6600 images.

Myself and Mike Kuchavik Jr of Havik Performance flew out of Newark on Thursday and headed to Indy were we met with a bunch of old and new friends at the track on drive in day. It was great seeing Bill Pemberton, Kurt Wadsworth, Shawn Romig (ViperRacingHistory.com!), Jim Cameron, Alex Macevicius, Matt Terrico, Scott and Courtney Manwell, Mansen Way, and Eddie Martin. So many great people. The Texas region showed up and even brought along a Viper owner Helmut, from Germany! (Yes, Bill we talked about German things.) Wes earned the best "Uber" of the week award, had to break in the brake pads or something so I think we got to the middle of 4th?

Also in attendance were several Team Viper alumni including John Donato, Herb Helbig, Dick Winkles, and the man, Roy Sjoberg. Ben Keating also came along with the #91 TI Automotive GT3-R as he was in the big race himself. We had a little bit of everything! Every generation was present across the board including Competition Coupes and ACR-X's. There was even a Viper car show in the pits.

We shared track time with the SRO series (albeit they were the hosts and we were the guests) during their Indy 8 Hour race weekend and I thought the Vipers didn't get as much time as I hoped BUT the event itself easily became my most photographed one yet! So hopefully there's more of these races cause I'll shoot them all!

Any way, enough typing. I need to give the old eyeballs a break. Thanks to everyone for the support this week, it was fantastic and I really can't wait to do more! I'll periodically update this thread with more photos, here's a few to start from Day 1.

--RS

P.S. IF you would like to see ALL the watermarked versions of the photos I shot, you can do so HERE on my website. It might take a minute or two to load and they are viewable in blocks.

[str5010]

For those who aren't on social media it will be tough to see all that happened at this event so definitely take a look at Ron's awesome photos!

Here are the broadcasts of the competition. The race group would go out first followed by the time trial group. Saturday's events were on a very cold track with ambient temperatures in the high 30's and we were the first ones out that day. Sunday took place mid day after others had already run on track and temperatures were closer to 60F.

[str5010]

[str5010]

[Bill Pemberton]

Super fun time and so glad Ron could share some of the pics he took at the event ---- the young man is a true talent! One has to believe all the pics and info ( thanks to Shawn Romig posting the races ) will entice many more folks to go to a Viper Racing League event if there are more in 2023?! I have to admit Ron must have been on roller skates to take the mass of pictures he took, since the Speedway is an extremely large track and there are shots from many angles. Make sure you check out his site!

[Bill Pemberton]

Heh, Ron, why not put up some of the action shots with 2-4 cars in them while running on track. It should not take you long to look through almost 7000 shots, I am sure you can cut down the 5 hours it took me to skim through all those Indy photos, ha!

[Schen]

Sorry I haven't gotten back to this sooner but I've been an absolute mad man getting out all the photo orders! I really appreciate the support that the VRL and all the teams at Indy have given me for reaching out and placing orders. I'm looking forward to shooting more of these events in 2023!

--RS

[Bill Pemberton]

Thanks youngster and I am sure a lot of the VOA faithful appreciate all those action shots. I knew you had some really great pics of the races but I knew I could not post so nice for everyone to see some of your killer photography work!!!!!

[TheWessss]

Great shots ron!!!!