Motorsports like F1, NASCAR, MotoGP are bringing the action into your living room like never before

There are so many sensations that fans miss out on when they watch a race on television. They don’t see just how dramatic elevation changes are, they don’t scrunch up their nose at the smell of cooked brakes, they don’t feel the waves of air dispersed around them as a pack of cars comes past them at 200 miles per hour.

And those are just the little details you get from sitting trackside. Imagine the feelings that the drivers experience that fans will never begin to know about.

“More people have jumped out of planes skydiving than have ever put themselves in a car and raced,” Andy Jeffers, owner of Sports & Entertainment Media, who coordinates placement and sales of in-car cameras for NASCAR, told ESPN.

With traditional stick-and-ball sports, the action is confined to a relatively small area. Unless you’re watching home runs land in McCovey Cove during a San Francisco Giants game, you can bet that most of the action will be contained within the arena.

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In motorsports, though, racers are captured as they traverse several miles of racetrack at a time. There is a lot of ground for broadcasters to cover, which means filming from a distance and using wide angles. Those tactics deliver viewers all the action, but being at such a distance, they do so at the cost of conveying the speed drivers achieve.

“How do you show speed? That’s the hardest part in [broadcasting] any form of motorsport: showing speed,” Jeffers said. “It’s tough to go talk about a driver, ‘Man, what these guys and girls are doing, this is unreal! They’re on the edge the whole time!’ Really? The aerial [camera] is awesome because it shows so much, but it also can look like L.A. traffic.”

That’s why so many series are working with broadcast partners and broadcast hardware developers like Broadcast Sports International to find new and unique ways of bringing fans into the driver’s seat.

Last season, Formula One began experimenting with a camera embedded in a driver’s helmet. NASCAR has been perfecting the art of capturing video from drivers’ foreheads since 2017. In MotoGP, the two-wheeled equivalent of F1, several riders’ protective leather suits now feature a camera embedded in the shoulder.

“It’s really hard to replicate the experience of a Formula…