Video: Visor Cam injects more thrills to televised motorsport

IT can be hard to visualise just how fast modern race cars are sometimes.

Tracks with huge run-offs, a lack of door-bashing racing, and wide camera angles do a good job of hiding the fact motorsport is faster now than ever before.

Indycar has found a solution – the Visor Cam. Okay, so it isn’t completely new, with the series pumping out a number of videos over the years from this angle. But hot diggity, if it isn’t the best footage in motorsport.

While most onboard shots give you a good feel of what is going on, the visor cam gives you a real drivers’ eye view. You get a sense of the violence that accompanies speed, with the camera moving with the drivers head as it is buffeted by the wind.

This footage of Ryan Hunter-Reay at Barber Motorsports Park almost looks sped up. But you can be rest assured, it isn’t!

The Visor Cam also helps demonstrate the unique challenge of oval racing. The North American favourite is oft ridiculed for simply being a continues procession of left turns.

But as this Visor Cam of Graham Rahal at Phoenix Raceway proves, it is anything but.

Drivers are dealing with an incredible 4.1G in the turns, wrestling the cars to stay on the right line, searching for where the rubber is, and battling with wind and aero wash from other cars.

Then you have Rahal again at Sebring International Raceway.

Sebring is infamous for its brain rattling bumps, and this is illustrated beautifully in the clip, with Rahal shaken harder than a maraca in a mariachi band.

Finally, Hunter-Rey returns to give a drivers-eye perspective of the St. Petersburg race track.

Try not to wince as he races towards concrete walls at an incredible speed, all the while wrestling a steering wheel that appears to want to do anything but obey his command.

Long live the Visor Cam. F1, take it now.