F1 Racers Have Some Fun! Off-Season Go-Karting.

It turns out our own Alex Laughlin isn’t the only professional race car driver that likes to spend some time in the offseason strapped into a badass kart. While Alex was down south in Daytona winning his very first kart race, F1 pilots Max Verstappen and Pierre Gasly were in the Netherlands with a couple of Red Bull carts on a track made of ice, of all things.

The pair of Formula 1 pilots got suited up and headed to Flevoland, where the chilly wintry air had provided the necessary conditions to freeze the track, leaving the boys with a perfect place to practice their drifting skills behind the wheel of these small, but fast go-karts. The karts had been fitted with special tires just for the ice and they provided just the right amount of traction to keep the karts controllable while still allowing the veteran drivers to kick the rear end out and have some fun.

As you can clearly see in the video below, they certainly did just that, slipping and sliding around the track at pretty good speeds while hitting the corners with the precision you’d expect from world class F1 wheelmen. The ice may have been slick, but these guys were slicker, and you can tell they were truly enjoying their time driving without the pressure of protecting a several-million-dollar cars.

As a photographer, I really find the slow-motion cuts to be really cool. There’s nothing like capturing a moment of chaos and having the ability to slow it down and show it in all its slow-motion glory to really show what’s happening while these karts are whipping around the track. Advancements in camera tech made this possible years ago, but it’s widely available now, even in most phone cameras, so it’s cool to me to see it being used so much now!

 

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