Drum stool to driving seat           
Nick Masons's passion for motor racing
stems back to when he was a young
boy accompanying his father to the track

“IT WAS ALL my dad’s fault really,” says Nick Mason when asked how he was first introduced to motor racing and photography.
“He was a documentary film director with a keen interest in film and still photography, and this, coupled with a passion for motor racing
was inevitably enormously influential on me.”
As a child, Nick had a Box Brownie camera which, he says, in the right hands, could achieve surprisingly good results. “Regretably, my hands were not the right ones, but it did give me a good introduction to photography.”
An SLR camera as a teenage birthday present introduced Nick to a new world of colour photography and stunningly fast shutter speeds. It was also at this time that he was given opportunities to watch motor racing with the most priviledged of passes – the photographer’s! “It was a struggle trying
to look like my dad’s assistant rather than a schoolboy who just got lucky.” Nick’s photography from this period includes paddock shots of cars that are now some of the most desirable and expensive collector’s cars in the world. “In one remarkable case I had taken a lot of pictures of a car that I was particularly struck by – 15 years
later I bought this car, only realising when I was handed the log book that this was the car I had photographed.”

 
Nick grabbed this shot of Hendrix backstage during one of the last multi-band theatre tours

By the mid-70s, Nick’s interest in motor racing had been rekindled and he swapped the drumming stool for the driving seat. “Every weekend I could, I would be racing myself, initially in a pre-war Aston Martin, but as budget and egos increased, in historic Grand Prix cars and then more modern sports cars. These of course are probably the most photogenic of all cars.”
One of Nick’s observations through his photography was the discovery of how useful pictures can be when re-assembling an unusual car. “You become committed to photographing every detail of every car that in any way might reassemble yours. I have more pictures of my Maserati T 61 Birdcages in pieces that I do of my children!”
As his passion for motor sport photography increased, he became involved with Olympus, driving a BMW M1 at Le Mans which they co-sponsored. “Apart from upgrading my equipment and getting my first serious telephoto lens, it also led to a marvellous experience – I got to spend a practice day before the British Grand Prix at Silverstone with Jeff Bloxham, Autosport’s chief photographer. The day was great fun and enormously educational. I spent it all bent double under the weight of tripods, telephoto lenses and motor drives, but I remembered the basic principles.
“A two-year stint with the parachute regiment is the ideal training for a motorsports photographer. It would be OK if the equipment stayed in the back of the car but, for a Grand Prix, there are fences to scale, cross-country hikes and an army of ticket enforcers.
I became Jeff’s apprentice for the day, and he reckons that 40lbs is around the weight he might have to carry to do the job properly.”
Nick’s first question, and Jeff’s answer, seemed to set everything in perspective. “I asked him where the best place to shoot from might be at Silverstone, expecting him to direct me to some niche from which guaranteed exciting pictures would come. His answer was:
‘It depends where the sun is.’ Of course, this sounds like rule number one of photography, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I forget when opening trunkloads of wonderful equipment. And, even the best camera cannot be expected to make nicely balanced pictures in situations where the human eye is squinting.” Of course, rules are made to be broken, and there are many situations where unusual lighting produces sensational pictures, but, as Nick began to realise, these are usually carefully thought out and are not simply lucky snaps that anyone might have got.
Nick and Jeff began in the pits. “Since this involved more close-up work, we left the big lens behind and worked with a wide-angle and a zoom lens. With crowds around, there is often only a split second to grab the gap through which can be seen the moment you’ve been waiting for. And even the time taken to focus can ensure that your instant opportunity to join the ranks of hard-bitten professional press photographers has been lost forever.
“One of my failings was that I didn’t shoot enough. If you shoot lots of pictures you’ll probably get a few good ones, and if you shoot few pictures you get a few bad ones! If you keep snapping, you may get situations on film that you never even saw at the time!