Panning tips?

[tymill]

I've been working on trying to take panning shots of moving cars - it's tricky!

Any tips to help out? I've only got a compact camera (Panasonic lumix dmc-zs3), but am pretty pleased with some results last weekend at a race in California. More shots in this gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tiyen.mi...eat=directlink
(and a few more shots over in the trucks section)

In particular, I'm not sure if the image stabilisation is helping me or hurting me when taking this kind of shot. My camera's got 2 "modes" for "optical stabilisation", but I'm not sure how it all works.





on this shot, the front of the car is blurry - is that likely because I'm focussed at the wrong distance, or it it something to do with the front of the car moving across the visual field in a some slightly different direction to the pan as the car is turning perhaps? (does that make sense??)

I noticed a few of my panning attempts wound up with the back of the car crisp, but hte front blurry. I can't imagine that the depth of field on my little handheld camera is so tight that the focus is a prob. But hey - I'm a novice - could well be very wrong!

Any tips or comments appreciated, thanks!