Category Archives: dash cam

The best in-car driving videos from Goodwood Revival 2013

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The best in-car videos from Goodwood Revival 2013.

In what presenters describe as the "biggest and best historic motor racing party of the year," the Goodwood Revival features famous cars, famous drivers and a racetrack. Combine the three and you've got a bloody-good weekend. Watching a peerless assortment of vintage racecars go round the track from the grandstands is good fun, but what's it like watching from the drivers' perspectives?

Fortunately, the proliferation of video cameras in vintage racing and online video services have allowed us to do just that. In particular, in-car videos are most entertaining when great drivers are behind the wheel, such as Indy Racing League champion and Indianapolis 500 winner Kenny Bräck. At last weekend's Goodwood Revival, he took some wet laps in a Ford GT40 and somehow managed not to go straight - pretty much ever. From the safety of our desks, he still made us a bit nervous sawing at the wheel on a straightaway next to a wall (pictured above).

We included six other in-car/bicycle videos from the weekend below, such as one with former Formula One racer and endurance racing legend Derek Bell, who manhandles an old Corvette and its venerable 396-cubic-inch, 425-horsepower V8. And despite the wet track during the bicycle race, don't expect any powerslides.

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The best in-car driving videos from Goodwood Revival 2013 originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 17 Sep 2013 18:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lapping Le Mans with 1956’s version of a dash cam

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1956 Le Mans footage

Mike Hawthorne and Ivor Bueb won The 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1955 driving a Jaguar D-Type. The following year, a few days before the race, a British broadcaster put cameras on Hawthorne's car, hung a mic from a plate on his race suit and had him narrate a lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe.

It is compelling viewing. A new pit complex was built after the massive accident on the front straight in 1955, but this was still a time when crews prepped for the race on roads that were open to the public. Hawthorne's lap includes maneuvers to avoid bicyclists and cars, and gems like letting us know that doing 185 miles per hour down the Mulsanne Straight was where you could "relax a little, recover your energy." Watch him work it like the men of old in the video below.

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Lapping Le Mans with 1956's version of a dash cam originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 01 May 2013 12:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Even older dashcam footage from 1907

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Vancouver street life in 1907 as seen in early streetcar dash cam vid - screencap

Let the dashcam navel-gazing continue. As the story goes, Australia's National Film and Sound Archive dug up some camera footage in 2008 originally thought to hail from Hobart, Australia. A closer look revealed the images were actually of Vancouver, Canada. In 1907, Seattle filmmaker William Harbeck took his hand-cranked camera aboard one of the city's streetcars and began capturing life as viewed from the streets. The 106-year-old film shows bustling neighborhoods filled with pedestrians, stray dogs and men on bicycles all darting around town. The clip is an interesting glimpse at a life gone by, and predates the claimed oldest dashcam video we showed you before by an impressive 19 years (although obviously it's using a streetcar and not a conventional automobile).

Sadly, chronicler Harbeck met an untimely end. When he was 44 years old, he was commissioned to document the launch of a world-famous ocean liner, a ship that wound up on the bottom of the Atlantic. The name of the vessel? The Titanic. Take a look at Hartbeck's look at Vancouver below.

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Even older dashcam footage from 1907 originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Watch what might be the world’s oldest dashcam footage from 1926

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The archives of the Fire Department of New York has released footage of a borough department responding to a fire in 1926. In the first of two silent videos, the camera is mounted on the car transporting Fire Chief John Kenlon from the Brooklyn Fire Department to a storage warehouse fire on East 123rd Street. Kenlon's name comes up frequently in the rise of the FDNY during the early part of the 20th century. The date of the video is given as April 24, 1926, and it was not only a remarkably snowy spring day, it could be the first dashcam video ever.

The second video takes us through the entire process of a fire call, from the fire alarm - placed in a box on the street - to the call going to the Manhattan Fire Alarm Telegraph Bureau and then being sent to the stations, and the department fighting the fire.

The low-res screencap above shows the hood of Kenlon's vehicle, with a clanging bell at the front, driving on the sidewalk among pedestrians to get to the fire. As you'll see in the videos below, the situation on the actual roads was just as chaotic as the driving. So is the footage playback itself, which repeats and plays upside down and backwards at times, but we think is worth every second.

Continue reading Watch what might be the world's oldest dashcam footage from 1926

Watch what might be the world's oldest dashcam footage from 1926 originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 05 Jan 2013 19:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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