April 1993 - Formula First Oulton Park Testing Onboard Camera

Several first here, first time driving this car (after original got destroyed two weeks before), first time driving at Oulton, and first attempt at building an onboard camera.
Background:
Privately owned onboard cameras were banned in the early 90's on single seaters, deemed too dangerous the use of the technology was reserved for TV Companies only (because they always know what they're doing, right?) but there were no rules regarding test days, so I built and run cameras as often as possible. Only occasionally did we get told to remove them.
This camera was a modified VHS-C camcorders from the era, they would often not survive long, and there was no such thing as action cameras back them, GoPro was another decade away. After a while I changed the design to have separate covert security style cameras feeding into Sony Video8 Walkmans mounted deep inside the cars.
Formula First was an entry level single seater racing series that run from 1987 to 2000 in the United Kingdom, the car was an open wheel spaceframe chassis with a Ford Fiesta XR2 engine and gearbox mounted transversally across the chassis (most single seaters have the engine and gearbox inline), which made the cars notoriously tail happy and difficult to drive.
Some of these videos are not very good quality, the vibrations in the cars often played havoc with the heads in the recorders, but this will hopefully give you some idea of what we achieved at the time.
Eventually I did get permission to run cameras in races, but it was a hard slog, I have 3 big boxes of tapes to convert to digital so there will be a lot of these types of videos uploaded over the next few months, so enjoy.

[@simoneghilardini5211]

Me realizing that this video is 5 years older than me and now we are racing together online (well, actually I'm still in the Lites Series lol😂) be like: 😳😳😳

[@testpilotian3188]

Quite a few of us have raced in various series over the years, Simon, Martin, Chris etc. Dom presently races in American Cup Car series in UK etc, it’s just cheaper and safer for us old farts to race online nowdays lol