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White Light at the Race of Champions

The end of 2008 saw Wembley Stadium host the ultimate motor-racing challenge: the Race of Champions, which saw leading drivers from across the world of motorsport, including Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel, Jenson Button and David Coulthard pitted against each other in identical cars on a specially constructed track. Lighting the way for the drivers was leading entertainment lighting supplier White Light.

White Light had a team of seven at the event, led by lighting designer Jason Larcombe and production electrician Steve Richardson, Richardson admitting that it was "an exciting event to work on - particularly for someone who likes cars, especially fast ones!"

The White Light team were called upon by the event's producers to provide lighting for the entrance of the cars, in the press area and in the driver's lounge, working through some quite challenging conditions imposed by both the weather and the building. "In freezing conditions, we constructed two five metre square, 4.5m high box trusses in the North service road, squeezing the trusses between the concrete pillars and requiring a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to work around the event's branding," Richardson recalls. Power to the trusses was fed from the outside broadcast area over 180m away to run 4kW, 2.5kW and 1.2kW HMI Fresnels together with 575W MSR Source Pars. "Once those were set up to the satisfaction of the TV director, it was time to move inside..."

Here, the White Light team provided lighting to the press room and the driver's lounge. The press room was equipped with upright sections of truss loaded with Source Pars to bounce light from the ceiling; in the driver's lounge similar truss sections were used to give good keylight positions for interviews, a relaxed feel for resting drivers, and spotlights fitted with gobos for corporate branding.

"The challenge about working indoors at Wembley is that it is wired for outside-broadcast but not really for additional internal lighting," Richardson notes. "We therefore had to run cables along roofs and come up with creative solutions to provide access for cables; ultimately we solved all of the problems, with the pictures beamed out to the Stadium and around the world looking quite fantastic." He also admits to enjoying the event for reasons other than just the lighting, particularly "getting to see some very fast cars driving around Wembley!"

The 2008 Race of Champions was ultimately won by World Rally champion Sebastien Loeb, just beating newly-retired British F1 driver David Coulthard.

The Race of Champions is just one of the many events spanning the whole range of entertainment lighting that White Light is involved with, other current projects including countless theatre productions, the new Nurburgring Visitor Centre, the Westfield Shopping Centre, the Northumberland Lights and many more. A portfolio of these projects together with details of the full range of products and services the company offers can be found at www.WhiteLight.Ltd.uk.

Photo Courtesy of Race Of Champions

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White Light at the Race of Champions

18th March 2009

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