ferrari_chris
Did you go for the whole three days - campout like?
Also, what was your favourite car?
For the 7th or 8th year in a row my flatmate, a friend and myself went for the whole 4 days. The hotel manager books us in the same rooms a year in advance
One year I'd like to camp in there, but I enjoy being able to sleep in a real bed to do it more than once.
Thursday starts with me picking up my flatmate from his work in the morning and cruising from Sydney to Canberra to arrive around lunch time. We check in to the hotel and head out to the 'nats for around 4 or 5 hours. It's mainly campers setting up and the trade pavilions opening but it gives you good chance to catch up with some of the regulars while there's hardly any crowd around.
Friday morning we get in early. You really know you're at a car festival when you park your run-of-the-mill Corolla between a WRX STI and a FPV F6 Typhoon in the dirt carpark. The cars can park out on the field for the show'n'shine so that's when we take most of the glamour shots. Friday afternoon sees the cars take to the worlds first and best purpose built burnout track for the Burnout World Championship qualifiers and the Burnout Masters. Friday night is good for the cruising around the inner ring road without too many idiots getting in the way.
Saturday all hell breaks loose. No burnouts today but the grass driving events start and the Horsepower Heroes gets in to full swing. This year we finally saw a NA big block V8 break 1000hp at the rear wheels. There's the supercruise and stunt show on the main arena followed by fireworks and the rock band. This years stunt show was a spectacular failure - tricks that went wrong and a kid mown down by a drift car - he survived with minor injuries but the crowd had to lift the front of the car off him after it ploughed through a fence. The inner cruise road gets too blocked with people around 10pm so they shut down the road, but they don't kick the non-campers out to 1am so there's still time to get some happy snaps for those so inclined.
Sunday is normally fairly quiet (sort of). Finals of the Horsepower heroes, Sound-off, Go-to-whoa and burnouts always pull big crowds. Due to rain on Friday there were about 50 cars that couldn't qualify for the burnouts, so they ran them first and then followed with the finals - I guess 75 or so cars doing burnouts one after the other
All the pics of burnouts I've posted are of qualifying runs because the finals produce too much smoke to see through - it took 3 days to get all the bits of burnt rubber out of my skin
We stay an extra night to avoid the police on the roads, getting back to Sydney late Monday morning.
I don't know if I have a favorite car but the black Commodore ute with the swing lift doors (pics above) was pretty good, as was the Firebug (VW Beetle, pics also above). Effigy was also there but I haven't got around to doing the photos of that yet. Armygeddon was certainly one of the biggest crowd pullers. It was there last year in its unfinished state, but on Friday when it pulled a demo burnout (pics above) the crowd went wild. The Army boys did well until Sunday when they finally broke their new toy
I remember, I think it was 2 years ago, there was an R32 at SummerNats 
