Amazing what you find when you’re stumbling around YouTube on a Tuesday afternoon isn’t it? This is possibly the finest POV in-car camera footage I have ever seen. In-car footage is always interesting, but it’s rare to get that feeling of actually being in the driver’s seat, particularly in a single-seater.
The driver is 28-year-old Canadian, James Hinchcliffe. The track is Road America in Wisconsin and the car is a current Honda-powered Indycar, run by Schmidt Peterson Motorsports. The camera was apparently a GoPro (what else?!) Hero 4 Black and although the noise is mostly carried away by the wind on the fast lap, even that doesn’t seem to detract from the spectacle. It just feels like you are the one in the car, battling with understeer on the way through a fast corner, wrestling with snap oversteer on an exit kerb. It’s brilliant.
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Hinchcliffe was seriously injured in a crash during practice for this year’s Indy 500 and was subsequently ruled out of the rest of the 2015 IndyCar season. This was his first day back in an IndyCar at a test on 28th September, something which makes the eye-popping speed just a little bit more incredible.
The other thing you can’t help but notice is how good the track looks. This is what Dario Franchitti had to say about Road America in his column in issue 199 of evo:
‘It’s a four-mile, old school road course and it’s got a bit of everything. There are undulations, there are lots of really quick, ballsy corners, but it’s also got tight turns and to top it off there are a bunch of heavy and off-camber braking zones. Even in the IndyCar when we had about 1000bhp it took me 1min 39 seconds, and I’m very proud to say that I hold the outright lap record there. But the fact of the matter is that it’s a brilliant test in anything from a road car to an old CanAm car. It’s just in a different class and that’s why it’s my favourite track anywhere in the world.’
If you’ve got any other particularly good POV in-car camera footage then let us know in the comments.
