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If only these these races had onboard cameras…

The name Francois Hesnault is not one with which you’re likely to be overly familiar. A fine driver in junior formulas in the early 1980s – third and second in two consecutive seasons of French Formula 3 – he appeared to find the step up to uncouth turbocharged Formula 1 cars quite overwhelming.

In ’84 he qualified close to Ligier-Renault teammate Andrea de Cesaris only in the closing races, and his move to Brabham for ’85 was disastrous; alongside already two-time world champion Nelson Piquet, Hesnault was a complete non-entity, and after failing to qualify at Monaco, he was let go. But he did make a one-off return to Formula 1 later that year for the Renault team in the German Grand Prix, joining full-time incumbents Patrick Tambay and Derek Warwick. It would be the final time an F1 team ran three cars at a World Championship GP.

But there’s another reason that Hesnault has a place in F1 history: on that gloomy day at Neue Nürburgring, his Renault RE60 became the first car to start a Grand Prix carrying an onboard camera. Sadly, fate granted Hesnault only eight laps before falling victim to Renault’s lamentable reliability issues that season, but some of the footage gathered is on YouTube.

Compared with the 360-degree views acquired today on numerous Formula 1 and IndyCars through automatically-cleaned lenses, or the helmet-mounted cameras carried by some, the view of Hesnault’s efforts through a dirt-smattered camera probably looks primitive. But at the time it seemed deeply impressive: it didn’t matter that the image was blurred, nor that it was carried by a driver who wasn’t going to be dueling for the lead. Its mere existence gave we TV viewers a better understanding of what our heroes in multi-colored onesies went through from race to race.

For those of us old enough to remember that day 40 years ago (Aug. 4, 1985, to be precise), it still feels like a privilege rather than an expected part of coverage to see the driver’s perspective of exceptional pole-winning laps such as Max Verstappen produced at Suzuka this season, or Lewis Hamilton at Singapore in 2018. I’m sure there have been notable qualifying efforts in F1 in between, but those two stand out because they were on tracks where the consequences of an error are more than a loss of time and a twitch into a parking lot. Perils are necessary. But that’s a rant for another day…

Of course, we had seen driver’s eye perspective F1 action before that. It’s easy enough to find Juan Manuel Fangio testing his Maserati 250F at the Modena Autodrome, Mario Andretti lapping the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1966 and a series of clips from “Lap of the Gods” onboards. Patrick Depailler’s performances at Long Beach and at a wet Montreal are particularly fun. But these were all test laps, runs made just before official practice, or occasionally, during practice itself. Mike Hawthorn’s lap of Le Mans in the Jaguar D-type in 1956 is performed at low speed with the roads still open to the public, yet it is still invaluable. Derek Bell’s lap of Le Mans in a works Porsche 956 in 1983 is pure gold, but again, it’s recorded during practice.

So what did we miss? In date order, here’s a list of some of the great performances in motorsport history that we’d love to have seen from the driver’s seat.

The sheer novelty factor means it would be worth paying to see onboard footage of Tazio Nuvolari’s drive in the Alfa Romeo P3 at the Nurburgring in 1935 to see if it’s possible to figure out how the hell he kept the elegant but outpowered Alfa in contact with the thundering Silver Arrows of Auto-Union and Mercedes-Benz, and how he reacted when he passed the hobbled Benz of Manfred von Brauchitsch on that final lap to take an unlikely victory. And speaking of the Silver Arrows, no one mastered the rear-engined Auto-Unions like Bernd Rosemeyer, so witnessing his brilliant final win, at Donington Park in 1937, would be a poignant pick.

I’m not sure I could bring myself to agonize “alongside” Ted Horn over his misfortunes in the Indianapolis 500. Between 1936 and ’48 (IMS was closed from 1942 to ’45 due to World War II), he scored nine consecutive finishes of fourth or better, an extraordinary achievement at a time when racecars were far less reliable than today. Yet he never managed the ‘500’ win that his talents – he was three-time AAA series champion – so obviously deserved. But maybe his brave 1941 drive in the Adams-Sparks car, from 30th on the grid to finish third while nursing an injured arm, would provide gratification that for once at Indy, Horn’s fortunes had at least exceeded his pre-race expectations.

Nuvolari seals the greatest win of his career at the 1935 German GP. You could have put a camera anywhere on that Alfa with zero concerns about upsetting the aero. Getty Images

It’s stretching retrospective imagination to the limit to conceive an open-top sportscar from the 1950s could hold a camera and produce a clear view of the driver and track in wet conditions, but whenever I see reference to the book or movie, the “The Art of Racing in the Rain”, I first think of F1’s regularly acknowledged rain masters such as Rudolf Caracciola, Jacky Ickx, Pedro Rodriguez and Ayrton Senna, etc. but also of José Froilán González in 1954’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. In truth, he probably doesn’t belong with the aforementioned drivers, but in an exceptional season for the beefy Argentine (he finished runner-up in the ’54 F1 World Championship), his standout performance came in sportscar’s round-the-clock classic, driving a Ferrari 375 Plus. Partnered with Maurice Trintignant, González captured the second win for the Ferrari marque but the first for Scuderia Ferrari. Pressed hard throughout by Jaguar D-types and losing time on pitlane due to his engine’s reluctance to restart due to heat-soak and dampness, Gonzalez had to dig deep for this glory. To harness the 340hp output of a five-liter V12 in a car with a shorter wheelbase than the current VW Golf, on bias-ply tires on a soaking track, took the skills of a master. To do it for 18-19 hours, faster than any of the opposition, took skills that maybe even Gonzalez didn’t previously know he possessed. An onboard would have been exhilarating.

AI informs us that to film 10 hours, seven minutes and 48 seconds of content on 16mm film, one would have required 61 rolls of film, so recording an onboard of Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson in their Mercedes 300SLR on the Mille Miglia in 1955 would have been quite unfeasible… Oh, and changing reels every 10 minutes would have added to Jenks’s duties to the detriment of his navigation. But hey, we’re talking fantasy here, and there could be no better way to spend such a huge chunk of time than learning how to average 97.96mph on public roads on the 992.332-mile roundtrip from Brescia-to-Rome-to-Brescia. It’s one of the greatest feats in the history of our sport.

Those seeking a much shorter adrenaline shot might prefer Eugenio Castellotti’s qualifying lap for the 1955 Belgian Grand Prix – and would enjoy the added frisson of knowing just what it meant to the driver. At a time when Mercedes was painting F1 silver with its dominant W196, and barely nine days after losing his mentor and Scuderia Lancia teammate, Alberto Ascari, 24-year-old Castellotti lapped the fearsome 8.8-mile Spa-Francorchamps course half a second faster than Fangio’s Mercedes to claim pole position. The following year, Fangio would join him at Ferrari and together they would win the 12 Hours of Sebring; a few months later, Castellotti would conquer the Mille Miglia. But in his all-too-short life, arguably his greatest achievement remained that 4m18.1s blast around Spa in the Lancia D50.

Speaking of Fangio, our next “wish-we-there-in-the-cockpit” is obvious: it has to be the 1957 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring. But would you choose to have a rearward-facing camera from the cockpit of Mike Hawthorn’s Ferrari Dino 246 to watch first his teammate, Peter Collins, or the approach of the maestro’s menacing Maserati 250F? Or would you go for an over-the-shoulder view of Fangio’s most astonishing drive in a career full of them? The facts are these: Fangio took pole with a 9m25.6s lap. Seeing the Ferrari stars fill their fuel tanks for the race, he elected to run on half-tanks and make a pitstop. He had a half-minute lead when he pitted on lap 12 of 22, but the stop was a disastrous Maser mess, that included a dropped wheelnut. By the time Fangio was underway, he was 50 seconds behind leader Hawthorn, but he reset the lap record nine times – eventually leaving it at 9m17.4s – to pass the Ferraris on the penultimate lap, score his last win and seal his fifth and final championship. Wouldn’t we all love to know just how the great man produced a drive that he admitted afterward scared him? How much more speed was he carrying into/through/exiting turns? Were the gains small but at all 176-plus turns of the 14-mile ’Ring, or were there particular corners where he was 10mph faster than the Ferraris? On reflection, yes, let’s have that onboard camera fitted to the Maserati…

If Fangio had an onboard camera for the 1957 German GP, it would have been full of Mike Hawthorn’s Lancia at this late point in the race. Peter Collins sits behind them in third. Tony Smythe/Getty Images

Ten years later at the same venue, people were wondering the same thing about Jimmy Clark’s pole lap, his Lotus proving 9.4s faster than his nearest rival, the Brabham of Denny Hulme. Yet more impressive still was that in third place, a mere half second slower than Hulme, was Jacky Ickx in a Matra Formula 2 car! Running a 1.6-liter four-cylinder Ford FVA engine, the quiet Belgian was giving away 180hp to the Cosworth V8 in Clark’s car, and 120hp to Hulme’s Repco V8. Now imagine having side by side onboards of Hulme and Ickx – you can be certain their cars produced their near-identical lap times in very different ways.

It’s all too easy to focus this column on the Nürburgring’s greatest acts, but let’s add just one more – Jackie Stewart’s 1968 German GP raceday performance, when he won a miserable, foggy and wet event by four minutes! It would be great to see how much Stewart could see, over which crests he anticipated standing water, and where he merely relied on his cat-like reflexes to react to the worst of it…

Endurance racing tends to throw up some epic drives, but often only scraps of footage can be found on traditional platforms, and little of it is onboard. We’d want cameras on both cars in the I-tow-you-draft/You-push-I’ll-sandbag duel for 1969 Le Mans honors between Hans Herrmann’s Porsche 908 and Jacky Ickx’s Ford GT40; a helmet-mounted camera for Mario Andretti’s epic charge through the Sebring darkness in 1970’s Twelve Hours to win for Ferrari; Pedro Rodriguez’s wet-weather masterclass that same year in the Porsche 917 at Brands Hatch’s BOAC 1000km… or his 155mph pole at Le Mans in ’71.

A little later that year, Peter Gethin famously won what was then the fastest Grand Prix of all time, at Monza, with just 0.61s covering the top five. On that occasion, a 360deg rollhoop-mounted camera on the victorious BRM P160 would have produced some of the most scintillating footage in F1 history. Gethin’s winning margin over Ronnie Peterson’s March was a mere 0.01s, which remains F1’s closest finish ever, despite Michael Schumacher’s wearisome and misguided attempt at a dead-heat with Ferrari teammate Rubens Barrichello in the 2002 U.S. Grand Prix.

Chris Amon’s inspired charge in 1972’s French GP at the astonishing Clermont-Ferrand track would be a sight for sore eyes – and a sound for sore ears, given his Matra MS120D’s screaming V12. Watching a Renault 5GT Turbo lap the track (now called Charade) almost 40 years ago provides the info you need about the track: Amon’s challenge, sadly, will remain forever only in the mind’s eye.

Mark Donohue was a famously tidy driver, strongly believing that going sideways was wasting time that should have been spent going forward, and endeavored to set up his cars accordingly. But even he couldn’t help but get the Penske-run Porsche 917/30 of 1973 (main image) at some interesting angles as he controlled its devastating 1,200hp through its two rear bias-ply tires. Riding on the tail of this monster via forward-focused camera around Road America or Road Atlanta would be a life-enhancing experience.

Onboard footage from Villeneuve’s mightly battle with Arnoux at the 1979 French GP would be something to behold. Ercole Colombo/Getty Images

Sometimes, sideways is the fastest way, and two drivers renowned for such antics were Ronnie Peterson and Gilles Villeneuve. Arguably, Peterson’s greatest year was 1974 when, after the Lotus 76 proved one of Colin Chapman’s overwrought deadends, the team reverted to the once-brilliant but now five-year-old 72. Even in ‘E’ spec, the venerable wedge shouldn’t have been able to hold a candle to the Ferrari 312B3s of Niki Lauda and Clay Regazzoni, McLaren M23 of Emerson Fittipaldi, the Brabham BT44 of Carlos Reutemann or the Tyrrell 007s of Jody Scheckter and Patrick Depailler. But… Ronnie was special, and despite the 72’s reliability taking a dive, he somehow produced three wins that year. The best of these was probably at Dijon-Prenois, and onboard footage of him drifting around the undulations of this classic track in the Côte d’Or would be astonishing.

Talk of Dijon inevitably leads to thoughts of the aforementioned Villeneuve, and his Ferrari’s breathtaking duel with the Renault of René Arnoux in the closing laps of the ’79 French GP. Just finding still photographs of that battle is hard enough – there are three or four – so we should be grateful that

the TV footage is readily available, albeit fuzzy. Onboards with either would be magnificent.

Yet it’s Villeneuve’s not-quite-pole at Monaco in 1981, driving Ferrari’s powerful but wayward 126CK, its first turbocharged F1 car, that would be most mesmerizing to see through Gilles’s eyes. That car had no right to be on the front row (beaten to P1 only by Nelson Piquet’s underweight Brabham) and indeed the stablemate Ferrari of the excellent Didier Pironi was down in 17th, 2.5s slower. Lacking in downforce and with ‘light switch’ power delivery, Villeneuve’s prancing horse was as untamed as they come, so how did he manipulate the reins so effectively? Wouldn’t we all like to know. An enjoyable enhancement for this footage would be an inset from an additional camera down in the footbox, showing Gilles’ tap dance across the pedals.

A week later came another “How did he do that?” performance on this side of the Atlantic, when Mike Mosley charged from the back of the CART Indy car field to hit the front after 106 laps of the classic Milwaukee Mile to capture the Rex Mays Classic 150. The late, great Robin Miller waxed lyrical about Mosley’s performance in the dramatic-looking ‘Pepsi Challenger’ of Dan Gurney’s All American Racers team, saying that at times during the race it looked like the Eagle was a different category of car than even the Chaparral and the Penskes, it was carrying so much speed through the turns. Onboard footage of Mosley’s brave take on the famously flat oval would be epic…

As too, would be a rearward-facing camera on the rear wing of Gordon Johncock’s Wildcat in the 1982 Indy 500. Of course, the existing external footage of Gordy’s battle with Rick Mears is thrilling and even now can make the hairs on your arms stand up. But imagine if, rather than fixate on cuts to the drivers’ tense-looking wives on pitlane, the TV producers in the closing laps had been able to show how rapidly Mears’ Penske PC10 was bearing down on Johncock, how close was Mears’ attempted pass, how Johncock’s defensive line into Turn 1 at the start of the last lap sent the Penske tripping across the dirty air and up high… and then how Johncock prevailed by just 0.16s.

One driver who proved immensely popular around the world in the late ’70s and early ’80s was Keke Rosberg, one of the most resilient and determined fighters in the sport. He put on some wonderful drives in Formula Atlantic and Can-Am, but it was when he joined the Williams F1 team in 1982 that fans in Europe got to see close-up his special talents and hyperactive car control… which he needed because in 1982 and ’83 he was in a naturally aspirated Cosworth-powered car trying to fight the turbo tidal wave, while in 1984 he was in a car that flexed too much and was powered by the early turbo Honda whose power characteristics were primitive at best. Rosberg was the ideal man for both tasks.

But which of his performances would we most like to see from onboard? Well… Maybe the 1982 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch. There, Rosberg’s acrobatics in qualifying ensured the Williams FW08B was on pole, over one second quicker than the next fastest normally aspirated car, but come race day, fuel vaporization caused him to stall at the start of the parade lap, and he couldn’t get fired soon enough. Starting from the back, he passed eight cars on the opening lap and by lap 13 was running sixth. Inevitably, his pace on full tanks had taken its toll on his tires, so pitstops kept setting him back, but while the car lasted (sadly not to the end) he had put on a brilliant display.

By 1985, driving the Williams FW10, the Honda power curve was straighter, and the chassis was increasingly impressive, Rosberg often felt released like a cork from a champagne bottle. That 160mph lap of Silverstone (with a slow puncture and featuring spots of rain) must have been a thriller from the cockpit, but so too were his chases of teammate Nigel Mansell at Kyalami where he apparently used half a car’s width of dirt at every corner exit, and of Ayrton Senna’s Lotus-Renault at Adelaide.

Mansell and Senna, of course, would create many great moments of their own, not least their duel at Jerez the following spring, when they finished 0.014s apart. But imagine having Senna’s eye-view of his dexterity in the wet at Monaco in ’84, or seeing Mansell’s perspective of his relentless chase of teammate Nelson Piquet at Silverstone in ’87. Senna’s stunning pole at Monaco in ’88, 1.4s faster than teammate Alain Prost, was sadly never captured from the cockpit, and nor was Mansell’s supremely opportunistic pass of Senna at Hungary in ’89…

Thankfully, soon after, cameras started becoming more common on the leading cars in top race series, and these days they’re almost considered de rigueur. Watching the Hungarian F1 GP this weekend and Portland IndyCar GP next weekend just wouldn’t be the same without them. But which is the absolute greatest performance we never got to see from onboard? Well, feel free to comment below.

And raise a glass to Francois Hesnault, 40 years after he etched his name in F1 history – and was filmed doing it.