Debrief: Track To The Future 2022
In the past 12 months, I’ve worked together with a couple of brands on rally events, buggy events and other off-road events. One of the more recent events I joined was the Track To The Future event in France, organized by the MotoMentals team.
As with everything that MotoMentals does, this Enduro-focused event was organized and produced to perfection.
From the outside
From the participants point of view, everything was epic! The main course were of course 4 tracks all just 30 seconds away from the basecamp. 2 high speed tracks in open fields with some nice twisty sections to balance raw power with control and agility. The third track was a highly technical and twisty track where you needed to pay attention at all times. The fourth and last track seemed the most popular from where I was sitting: the jump track! High speed and lots of jumps to get your adrenaline pumping and explore your own limits.
The basecamp was a nice place with lots of seating options, a nice bar with all kinds of drinks and of course excellent catering: Breakfast, lunch and dinner! Furthermore there were toilets and showers right next to the basecamp where also most of the camping spots for the participants were set up.
All of that was wrapped up in a nice little theme called Track To The Future with lots of Back To The Future references on-site, like Doc Brown and even a Delorean driving around. The cherry to top things off were the bands that played live music in the evening, the little side-events that were organized to get some laughs and stories out of people and of course the -and this was my personal favorite - Ring Of Fire demo! Yes, they made of ring of fire where guys on mopeds would jump through. Can’t make that up!
Behind the scenes
From an FPV pilot’s perspective, I was in the best hands. Bart and Jesse (MotoMentals founders) took fantastic care of me and my girlfriend and our little 7 year old daughter. Right from when we got there, we were given coupons to get free drinks, free food. We were given T-shirts from the event (yes, all 3 of us). Jesse even made one especially for me with my logo on it! They even had arranged a flatbed truck to move around during the entirety of the event.
Yes: I had my own flatbed truck. Talk about living the dream!
The experience
The participants were absolutely dope and really enjoyed showing off while I chased them with my FPV drones. Most of them had never seen an FPV drone and had their mind blown once they saw the speed and agility of my little Jackson FPV drone!
The gear
I had 3 drones on site:
The first one is my typical 5” freestyle build called “Jackson”. It’s a perfect freestyle drone to chase dirtbikes, buggies and quads. Its freestyle agility is one thing but where it really stands out is its incredible efficiency: typical freestyle chases like this could last up to 7 minutes on 1 lipo. Compare that to your average 3-4 minute flight and you get about twice the flight time and thus footage for the same amount of lipos.
The second type of drone I had on that shoot was a new 7” long range build based on the design of Jackson. The major changes here are the fact that it’s a 7” instead of a 5”, it runs BrotherHobby 2305 1800KV motors instead of the Ethix Silk motors and carries a bigass 6S 2200mAh lipo instead of my typical FunFly 4S 1550mAh lipos. It’s also sporting a GPS module with Return To Home set up, just in case I fly out of my DJI FPV VTX range. It flew really nice to chase the bikes on the fast tracks but because of the insane power, aggressively changing direction while keeping your target in shot was difficult and at times a bit dangerous. The pop was just too much for the small airspace I wanted to occupy around the riders. So besides a couple of lipos for a few establishing shots and some experimenting, I decided not to fly them much more.
The last drone on hand was the DJI Air 2S drone. I decided not to fly it myself since I had 25 lipos for Jackson at the ready and non-stop targets to chase on almost all tracks. So my girlfriend flew it instead. She’s still new to the whole drone flying thing but given the safe airspace and space around us, it was safe for her to put the drone up at a safe altitude where I wouldn’t interfere and where she could get a couple of nice overview shots. It was awesome to see her fly and figure out which shots work and which ones don’t.
What I really enjoyed about this was that feeling of having somebody on your team that’s getting the shots that you know you want but you just don’t have the time to actually get. It will be cool once she’s got the hang of things and she knocks out those banger shots as well. The amount of dope footage that is useable for several types of content will be absolutely fantastic for the clients!
All in all, we had a blast during this 2-day event. MotoMentals was absolutely stoked with the footage we delivered and we already set up a deal the 2023 edition! Can’t wait for September 2023!
