Happy Holidays from The Austin Grand Prix

"Football? Football? What's a football?" Ralphie visits Santa in the holiday classic, A Christmas Story

 I'll never forget those first words I heard about the announcment of Formula 1 returning to the U.S. via Austin, Texas.

Each moment I have experienced this past year has been a real treat; from a fan's point of view, I never could have dreamed to be living in the host city for a racing facility that would welcome Formula 1 back to the U.S.

My sister, Kerri, and our editors, Mike and Andrew, have enjoyed connecting with y'all over our love of motorsports and Austin, Texas. We look forward to continuing down this path towards our November 2012 F1 race date and will have more exciting treats to share with you soon.

Thank you, to each of you, for your support over the past year!

Best wishes to everyone this holiday season! Enjoy this great song, "Christmas in Austin," by Shelley King as she shows you how we like to celebrate Christmas in Austin!

EXCLUSIVE: First Aerial Video of Austin Track Construction

Ever since I snapped the first aerial pictures of the future Austin track site out the window of my Southwest Airline flight in November, we’ve been pumped about this next post. An old friend and pilot took us up yesterday to shoot some amazing aerial footage of the track site.

The following video shows the view from our flight path coming from downtown Austin, which is west of the track site. We flew in over downtown Austin and then headed due east over the Austin Bergstrom International Airport (“ABIA”), paused for the commercial flight pattern (while two planes took off, which was pretty cool to watch from above) and then headed south to the track.  The Austin track is situated about 2.5 miles southeast of ABIA.  We proceeded to fly clockwise around the track. It was easy to point out the location from the air as the biggest thing to notice is the large, sand-filled rectangular area which borders the road FM 812 on the south end of the track.  Last week the Statesman reported that the attorney for the USGP project, Richard Suttle "confirmed that the layout for the track has been cleared," but from yesterday's flight it looked to us as though only a third of the Austin land has been graded. Maybe we are misunderstanding the context of his quote. What do you think?

Exclusive: First Aerial Video of Austin Track Construction from The Austin Grand Prix on Vimeo.

More Video and High Resolution Pictures coming soon!!

Soundtrack courtesy of Ghostland Observatory, one of our favorite Austin bands, check them out on MySpace.

A special thanks to Ben and Coy, without which this would not have been possible!