Speed & Sound: Performance – A Third Eye
The benefits of having an onboard camera.
Story by Budd Stanley
Track days, while inherently fun, are rather costly, and you don’t get a whole lot of track time to master your ride or the track you are trying to conquer. Many times there are several tracks that are included in a year’s membership, making this task even harder. However, to help gain even more experience and to learn from errors made on course, we should look at what professional athletes have been doing for well over a decade. They have been doing homework to increase their skills.
Whether it be a hockey player, footballer or golfer, they all put in a huge amount of time analyzing video. Whether it be to break down an opponent’s characteristics or to work on strengthening their own weaknesses, video replay of the action can teach you a lot of things. In our case, this is where an in-car camera comes into play. A video recording of your time on track, or in the rally stages, can give drivers an added tool to improve driving skills, or course identification. GoPro, a California-based company, has been building miniature motorsport cameras for a couple of years now, and has just released its Motorsport Hero Wide kit, an in-car camera with a 170-degree field of view.
Built with motorsport in mind, this US$199.99 kit includes a camera and waterproof cover, measuring 44.5 x 58.4 x 31.8 mm. Also in the kit is a suction mount, handle bar mount, and roll bar mount as well as several adhesive mounts and adjustable knuckle arms. This allows you to mount the camera anywhere you want on the vehicle. I’ve had cars up to 130 km/h using the suction mount, and the adhesives will handle twice that.
The camera records 55 minutes of AVI video, at 512×384 pixels and 30 fps, or will take 5-megapixel 2592×1944 photos. Capable of shooting photo bursts, time-lapse photography and video, and even able to record upside down, this little camera gives a driver an impressive variety of placements and angles.
Pros
The Hero Wide has a wide field of view with great use of mountings and options. Playback is simple with both PC and TV hook-ups, so that you can spot your mistakes between runs. A 2-gigabyte SD card makes media storage easy.
Cons
The camera has an inboard mic, so sound is terrible unless mounted in-car with the weather strip removed. Lack of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries requires the use of high-priced non-rechargeable ion-ion batteries. And they’re not included. Finally, the wide-angle lens makes hard turns look less spectacular.
Conclusion
While you’re not going to make any documentary movies with this camera, it is an extremely useful tool to find racing errors, or even record a little espionage when a faster driver gets in front of you. Yet the quality of video is still good enough to put together small online videos of your heroics. Either way, it’s a great investment for the money that will see you improve your lap time.
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