Moonlight driving: the story behind Frits van Eldik's rare F1 photograph

Frits van Eldik is one of the world's most accomplished motorsport photographers. Over the past 20 years, the Dutchman has shot Le Mans, MotoGP, Formula 1, and "everything else that moves fast." He's seen it all. But motorsport still manages to throw up the odd surprise, as the story behind his moody picture of Fernando Alonso's racing car proved: "The image is special," Frits says, "because F1 cars normally do not drive in the dark."

Frits went to the Formula 1 winter test in Barcelona to take pictures for ANP, the largest news agency in the Netherlands. F1 teams use the four-day event to see how their cars are running before the season begins at the end of March. ANP wanted pictures of the Dutch driver Max Verstappen but bad weather prevented Frits from getting them.

Top racing cars can shoot past photographers at well over 300km per hour, so the challenge was to keep the camera focused as Alonso's car approached, passed, and moved away at high speed. That's where the camera's expanded autofocus points and AF tracking came in, as the EOS-1D X Mark II can shoot 14 perfectly sharp frames per second with full AF/AE tracking. Frits locked on to the car and it remained locked.

Frits used a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens, though he has lenses ranging from 8mm to 800mm – ready for everything from up-close action to wide atmospheric shots. And it doesn't get more atmospheric than this image of the car in the dark, red lights bouncing off the track.

"There is no second chance," Frits says. "You always try to capture something different, which is not easy in Formula 1 as the standard of photographers is very high. The other part is luck. I was concentrating on the unusual situation with the darkness and just the red light on the rear of the car. I wasn’t expecting the red 'traffic lights'. So when they were switched on, it created some magic."