Thunder Duel

It was quite a complex creative project, a collaboration with Rodion RaY29rus. We wanted to convey the mood of the race, the atmosphere of rain, the tension of the moment. I'll tell you right away: the F1 cars we took photos of for this picture are mockups. And these mockups had to be visually refined quite a lot to become "real" F1 cars.

About our idea

Initially we wanted to recreate a hostorical moment of some race, but it's hard to imagine a race not being cancelled in such downpour and thunderstorm, and therefore this situation is impossible in the real world.

It all started with this draft right here:

Rodion will tell us why we moved away from the idea of historical reconstruction:

"The original idea was Spa Francorchamps, the Kemmel Straight. I used Gran Turismo 6 to get a "sketch" of some sort for the angle and background, and used this exact track and place in the game. But in the end, since we had to use two cars from different years, any historical accuracy went out of the window, so we decided that it was not worth recreating Spa.

From what I managed to find, those two cars were: the cockpit is a Ferrari F300 (1998); and the second is either F399 (1999), F1-2000 (2000) or F2001 (2001).

the cockpit is a Ferrari F300 (1998)

F399 (1999), F1-2000 (2000) or F2001 (2001)

Perhaps connoisseurs would easily recognize the actual cars those mockups suppose to represent, but this is clearly not my level of knowledge, so I had to search for quite some time. As you can see from the video, the car in front had to go through much less changes to be closer to the real one. I had troubles finding a car with a rear wing like that and didn't find any, but it's still possible it existed and was only used in one race, or something like that. As for the mockup car we used for the cockpit shot, the interior was only barely similar to the real thing, so it took much more time to work on the cockpit

It was interesting for me to find the specific cars, to get the background together, to make the mockups look close to the real thing. This project was like the Holy Grail for me."

We restored the "real" F1 car livery from these photographs

So, the process went like this:

1. I learned that one of the museums had an F1 car on display. I arranged to be allowed to photograph the F1 car from the cockpit. A lot of thanks to Anton (@skrypnikovanton) for this).

2. Borrowed a red suit and helmet from Sergei (instagram @serg.moshkin), an acquaintance of my acquaintance (@robodec). And I called a fellow photographer Ilya (@ilyalookit), whom I put in the F1 car. It was so cramped that not many people could fit in there.

I stitched together several photographs (Sigma 12-24 + Canon 80D). Museum "M.o.s.t." (Moscow)

3. Initially, Rodion and I thought we would use the same car (inside view + outside view). But at the stage of processing we realized that we made a mistake with the angle (the shot of the car from behind did not fit the background with the shot from the cockpit), so I waited for the car exhibition, which happened to have another F1 car (also a mock-up, but a different one), and this time we already knew how to get the right angle so I got the shot we needed.

Festival "Autoculture" in the Arkhangelskoye estate (Moscow)

4. After that, the work of assembling all the materials into a single picture began.
We had to finalize a lot of things. The racing livery had to be fixed on both cars, for example.

The amount of work and stages of retouching can be seen in a small video:
https://youtu.be/pi5HdFbdJ78?si=Pt-q6ziroIc7wl9Q