Santa Pod is Europe’s first permanent drag racing venue, and this aerial photo was taken on a race day. This site us a disused WW2 American Air base once called RAF Podington and it was here that Sammy Miller set the current world drag racing record with a time of 3.58 seconds and a speed of 386mph.

Now I’m not much of a Drag Racing expert, but the cars line up at the north end (you can see a few waiting up there) and then race 1/4mile in various different categories called weird things like “Top Fuel”, “Pro Mod” and “Top Alcohol Funny Car”. Halfway along the track there’s also a tractor – but I think it’s just cleaning up rather than racing.

More info on Drag Racing, as ever, on Wikipedia.

Thanks: Rick

Fantastic shadow being cast from the sign on top of the Main Street Station Hotel and Casino and Brewery in Las Vegas. There’s actually two signs, which means we can see it backwards too. Nice.

Useless fact about this hotel? The men’s toilet off the main casino floor contains a large piece of the Berlin Wall to which the urinals are affixed. Apparently the Travel Channel voted it Las Vegas’ number 2 historic bathroom.

Only number 2? I wonder what on earth number 1 was…

Thanks Gwaer and Babaganoosh.

Invasion of the fat planes! There’s a really fat green plane at Heathrow (which looks a little like Thunderbird 2)…

And at Hong Kong International, there’s some sort of fat pink alien spacecraft!

(Or these might be fire training aircraft of course…)

Update: from the comments, here’s a lime-green fatplane, and a white one which has some mysterious Dutch writing next to it…

Thanks to Mako, foo and Marco.