F1’s TV department is always looking for new angles and fresh shots. This year has seen the return of the pedal cam two decades after the last experiment, while the Dutch GP opened up an opportunity to try something different in order to give a better impression of how steep the banked corners really are.
The shot was only seen briefly on Saturday and Sunday at Zandvoort, and only on the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz. However, the first F1 outing for a gyro stabilising camera was judged to be a success as the shot tilted when the Spaniard ran around the banking.
“Just look at this new camera we’re trying,” said F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali, who happened to be in the Sky F1 commentary box when the shot appeared in FP3. “I think it’s important for us to try to transmit the sense of speed, the sense of what is really on the track.”
The man responsible for the pictures we see transmitted from the cars is F1’s head of onboard Steve Smith, who has been doing the job for over three decades.
“Stefano and Ross [Brawn] are keen to bring innovation in, new stuff to show that we’re not standing still, and moving forwards,” says Smith.
“And so this year we introduced the pedal shot. Eventually we want the 360 camera able to transmit live off the car. Currently it is an independent unit, which records into the actual unit, and then we download the footage afterwards, and then that’s used for social media.
“It is our eventual hope that you watch the international feed on TV, supplementing that with an iPad or your phone for watching a 360 camera.”
F1 is always open to feedback from fans, but it’s not easy to keep everyone happy.
“I think what happens sometimes is people see something and they write in and say why don’t you do that in F1?,” says Smith. “And the biggest thing for us is single camera shooting.
“For example, Martin Brundle did a feature on Sky in a Ferrari at Fiorano a couple of years ago. He went out in the car, and they loaded it with GoPros. He did two laps, with three or four different shots. They brought him in, they moved those shots to somewhere else on the car, he did another two laps.
“Then he came in, they removed all the cameras. There were another two laps, and they cut it all together so you can’t see any cameras. But it’s 10 different shots. It doesn’t do us any favours, because then someone says why can’t we see that in a grand prix?”
The clear inspiration for the gyro camera F1 tried at Zandvoort was…
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