Most of the pictures I took on my old Zenit 12XP were made at Oulton Park.
I was about thirteen when I got the camera and, as a teenager interested in cars and motorsport in the late 1980s, Oulton was an obvious hunting ground. Film was bought with pocket money, processing wasn't cheap and every press of the shutter had a price attached to it. You didn't come home with 600 photographs and spend the evening deciding which 30 were worth keeping. You had 24 or 36 chances and that was that. It wasn't unusual to eke a roll of film out over two or three race meetings.
I had my favourites. I was fascinated by Porsche 928s and whenever I spotted one I'd take a photograph of it.
One of those photographs survives. A928 WAK, photographed on the grass at Oulton sometime around 1987.
I've been going through some of those old negatives recently, photographing and digitising them at a resolution I could never have imagined when they were taken.
And something odd happens when you look at them on a modern monitor.
When I was young, I thought the subject was on the circuit or the main focus of the frame. Now I realise part of the real story was sitting in the car park behind it.
Cars that weren't remotely interesting at the time now are. Sierras, Cavaliers, Metros, Escorts and all the other ordinary machinery that simply happened to be there have become part of the photograph. Sometimes I find myself looking beyond the car I originally photographed to see what is parked behind it.
The pictures have become little accidental records of a world nobody thought needed recording.
The Zenit itself has survived all of this.
It's a wonderfully agricultural thing. Heavy, solid and almost completely devoid of anything that could be described as assistance. There's the unmistakably solid thunk of the shutter, the manual wind-on lever and the bright view through the Helios 44M lens. Focusing means turning an actual focus ring until the picture looks sharp. Exposure involves watching a pair of flickering LEDs in the viewfinder and doing something about it yourself.
Before I even took the lens cap off, the Zenit was already doing what modern cameras don't: making me remember.
So, for the 2026 Oulton Park Gold Cup, I decided to take it back.
My girlfriend and I were staying at Blakemere in the caravan, towed there by my E39. It's one of our favourite places to stay and barely ten minutes from Oulton Park, which makes it just about perfect for the Gold Cup weekend.
The weather was less perfect.
It rained for much of the weekend, leaving the paddock wet, the skies grey and the light constantly changing. Not ideal conditions for experimenting with an old manual camera loaded with film that had expired eleven years earlier.
Alongside the Zenit I'd brought my digital Canon, which provided the sensible option. Digital photography is extraordinarily good at this sort of thing. You can alter ISO as the light changes, shoot bursts, check the result immediately and take hundreds of pictures without giving it a second thought.
The Zenit offered none of those things.
Inside it was a roll of AgfaPhoto VistaPlus 200 with an expiry date of August 2015.
Eleven years out of date.
I'd found two rolls of it sitting in a drawer, which seemed as good a reason as any to put one in the Zenit and see what happened.
Actually, I'd already found out what happened to the first one.
I'd taken photographs with it on the Sunday, then discovered that while I could still remember how to focus the Zenit, set the exposure and operate the shutter, I'd completely forgotten how to rewind it. I neglected to depress the collar around the shutter release before turning the rewind crank and promptly ripped the sprocket holes out of the film.
That one went in the bin.
So by Monday I was on my second attempt, the rain had eased enough to make the experiment worthwhile and I had another 36 frames to play with. This time I found myself falling back into habits I hadn't used properly for decades.
Focus. Check the exposure. Compose. Fire.
Then remember to wind the bloody film on.
It changes the way you look for photographs. With the Canon there's very little penalty for taking a picture that doesn't work. With film, even an old roll that has been sitting around for more than a decade, every frame feels valuable.
So rather than trying to photograph everything, I started looking for pictures that might have existed when I was a teenager.
Cars at familiar angles. Paddock scenes. Details. Moments where there was nothing obviously modern in the frame.
I wasn't really trying to document the 2026 Gold Cup with an old camera.
I was trying to see Oulton Park through it again.
And then I found a Porsche 928.
Nearly forty years earlier I'd photographed A928 WAK here with this same camera. Now, sitting on the grass at Oulton Park in front of me was RJO 928.
Same circuit. Same camera. Same photographer. Same inexplicable urge to take a photograph of a Porsche 928.
Obviously I did.
Some things, apparently, haven't changed at all.
Then I sent the film away.
And waited.
What came back was better than I could reasonably have hoped for.
Not technically better. That isn't the point at all.
The colours are wrong. Reds have wandered off somewhere, the greens are cool and muted and the contrast isn't anything like what a modern digital camera would produce. There's a slight haze over some of the pictures, fine grain throughout and a little light leakage creeping into the edge of the frame. On one photograph, rather more than a little.
They're imperfect.
And they're absolutely lovely.
There's a dreamy quality to them despite the subjects themselves being properly in focus. Put the right car in the frame and, for a moment, the photograph doesn't particularly look as though it was taken in 2026.
It looks like something I might have found in an envelope of old prints at the back of a drawer.
Which, perhaps, was what I was trying to achieve all along.
Nearly forty years have passed since I first stood at Oulton Park with this camera hanging around my neck.
Oulton is still there. The Zenit is still here. And, fortunately, so am I.
None of us is quite the same.
The circuit has changed, obviously. The cars certainly have. The thirteen-year-old who once had to make a roll of film last an entire day now has a digital camera capable of taking more photographs in an afternoon than he probably took in his first few years of photography.
And yet, holding the Zenit again, very little felt unfamiliar.
My fingers remembered where everything was. I still wound the film on with my right thumb. I still turned the focus ring back and forth through the sharp point before settling on it. I still watched the light, waited for cars to move into the right place and wondered whether I'd actually got the picture.
The difference is that this time I understood that the things around the subject mattered too.
Perhaps in another forty years nobody will care very much about the cars in these photographs. Maybe someone will instead be peering into the background, fascinated by some completely ordinary car that happened to be parked there in 2026.
That's the wonderful thing about photographs. You don't always know what you're recording until enough time has passed.
The Zenit has already taught me that once.
I'm rather pleased I took it back to Oulton Park to remind me.
