Surely sticking a camera anywhere outside a car without some perspex shielding is asking for a broken camera. Might as well film through the screen.
Have you seen any the “Getaway in Stockholm” series? They break cameras in each one, normally near the start.
My company does quite a lot of covert surveillance kit, and one of the things that comes up fairly frequently is mounting cameras in cars. I think the easiest way is to use one that’ll take a standard tripod screw, put it on a small stand and gaffa tape it to the dash board. Make sure everything’s tight and well stuck down if you’re going to be throwing the car around though! I recently gaffa taped a camera to the side of my helmet when I went go-karting. Worked a treat, except I’d grabbed the wrong camera so the whole thing was in B&W… :-
These people http://www.dogcamsport.co.uk do a lot of vehicle and helmet mounted camera systems, we buy microphones and screens from them, and have found them to be generally pretty good. If you just want a bullet camera there are probably other places that’ll do them cheaply too, give me a shout if you want me to try to find the supplier we use. The cameras with Sony CCDs in them seem to be the best ones at the moment, and I say this despite avoiding anything Sony in most other areas!
For in car camera on runs or track, shooting stills or vidio I’ve got to recomend this motorsports Hero outfit check it out at www.goprocamera.com I got one its brillient.
I cobbled one together from some aluminium checker plate for my iphone 4S, its a great camera for track days HD and also anti shake. Fits to my TR Lane harness bar in the middle with a couple of exhaust brackets. Couple of photos off the car here. Will post some with it on the car at my next track day if anyones interested.
We recently got the Gopro motorsport mount and it is simply superb.
Light, easy to remove, position, and in good quality, I would go for a proper Gopro mount even if you need to fit an adaptor for a standard tripod screw. They will hold up to 150mph on the outside of the car, apparently.
Guess it depends on your budget and as you say how your going to use it. Mine cost about £10 in bits. It’s also filmed top down and max speed about 90mph.
Just a word of warning but most track day companies WONT allow sucker mounts , generally you have to bolt your camera in . If you crash and its not secure it turns into a flying brick inside your car ouch !!
I used to make my own brackets also using exhaust clamps to the roll cage with my old big video camera .
But now i would also recomend the Gopro hero 2 all the way . It films in HD and has off the shelf roll bar mounts, sucker mounts etc. its also the size of a fag packet.
Ive posted this link before but its filmed witht the hero2 in HD. You can see ive used a sucker mount on the front wing and bonnet (not a track day) , the rest is filmed attached to the roll bar.
camera shake from the roll cage is surprisingly little
No worries, glad it was helpful. The mounts are made in eastern europe somewhere, so it takes a week or two to get them shipped over, but great quality and customer service.
The GPS is a proper datalogger, a Starlane Stealth GPS-3. Excellent bit of kit, but not cheap. The unit that does GPS laptiming is £330, then I needed an extra module that wires into the car’s loom (that was another £250) that then gives G-forces, throttle position, RPM and gear selection.
If I only used it on my MK2.5, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think I would just get some sort of laptiming app that works on a smartphone, and then log other parameters through the car’s OBDII socket - something like Palmer Performance’s PCMScan software running on a cheap laptop. I also use my datalogging gear on a motorbike that does not have OBDII, hence the need for this datalogging stuff.