must find a monopod as well , arms get a bit sore after a while
Monopod is very useful - It steadies the whole thing without stopping you panning freely.
The vast majority of my shots are completely hopeless as well - I have a reasonably good, long lens (300mm f/4.5 nikon prime) which is quite sharp wide open, but it's manual focus, so tracking focus on fast moving bikes is, well, a challenge.
I had enough reach to get into turn two okay - my effective focal length is 450mm due to a smaller sensor. The settings that worked okay for me were f/8 or f/11, in order to maximise my depth of field, at ISO 400. This gave me around 1/300 second exposure, which was short enough to slow things down without being so short that it just freezes everything.
I basically did two "types" of shot - prefocussing on the ripple strip toward the end of turn two, and snapping bikes as they came into focus, for this sort of shot:
This one is pretty forgiving - the motion of the bikes are mainly towards me, so there's not a lot of blurring. But it's pretty boring.
The more frustrating shot (but better when it works) is to track the bikes as they exit turn two, trying to simultaneously pan with the bike and pull the focus back at the same time, so I get a more side-on shot. These are my favorites, but it's a really low percentage shot - I only got two or three of these all day that were worth having.
I reckon it's a learning exercise - I'm getting a little better each time.
