One day at Spa-Francorchamps with two track-only Yamahas for Carters & Pistons.
On September 12th, I worked at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps as camera on a video production for Carters & Pistons, built around the Yamaha R6 GYTR and the R1 RACE.
Both machines exist because their road versions no longer do. The R6 GYTR keeps the 599cc inline-four alive as a pure circuit bike, with an Akrapovic race exhaust, a dedicated GYTR ECU and racing harness, and fully adjustable KYB suspension. The R1 RACE carries the 998cc crossplane engine with Brembo Stylema calipers, new generation KYB forks, aerodynamic winglets and the full electronics package. Neither has lights, mirrors or a number plate, and neither can be registered for the road.
That changes the brief before the first frame. These are not bikes you can photograph on a mountain road at the end of the day, so the circuit is not a location choice, it is the only place the subject makes sense. Spa became part of the story rather than a backdrop.
The work covered video as the main deliverable, with stills produced alongside it during the same day. Everything was shot static in the pit lane, without track time, which is the harder version of this kind of production: with no movement to rely on, everything has to come from camera position. Most frames sit between ankle and knee height, low enough to put the bikes above the lens and make them read as crouched rather than parked.
Placing the two machines nose to nose across the pit lane line gave the wider frames a tension neither bike had on its own, with the white line running through the middle of the composition. Around those, I worked on detail: slick tyres, the titanium exhaust, the race number boards, the brake discs. Those are the frames that tell a viewer this is a race bike and not a showroom bike, and they also give a video edit somewhere to breathe between the wider shots.
Conditions in the Ardennes changed constantly, alternating between hard direct sun and flat overcast within minutes. Rather than wait it out, the shot list was reorganised around the light: high-contrast detail work during the bright windows, wider environmental frames when the cloud came back and the shadows opened up.
Running stills and video in parallel is mostly a question of timing. Every time the video rig was set and locked off, there was a short window before the next setup, and that was enough for a handful of stills from angles the video camera was never going to use. Nothing gets delayed, and the photo set ends up matching the film instead of feeling like a separate shoot.
The objective was to deliver a complete set of video and stills covering both machines, usable for Carters & Pistons across the film itself and their own communication, and built around what these two Yamahas actually are: circuit-only machines, photographed on one of the best circuits there is.