Race cars zip around tracks at close to 200 miles per hour, but getting a real sense of that speed can be hard for viewers at home. To bring a better feeling of the velocity of NASCAR racers, Fox Sports is installing a rail cam along the second turn at Charlotte Motor Speedway for this Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600.
According to Sports Video Group, the network will use a Mega Trax MX 500 radio-controlled robotic camera on a rail set up along the inside track wall, giving viewers a truer sense of the speed at which NASCAR drivers race.
The camera passed a test run at Fontana, California’s Auto Club Speedway, in March, where it was used mostly to show the pit crews at work. Fox is building 850 feet of rail at Charlotte to support the camera as it moves along the backstretch, following cars at top speed and relaying the images and sensation to viewers at home. The camera can go 0-to-60 mph in three seconds, and can exceed 90 mph. The camera originally comes from the film industry—its high-speed capabilities make it suitable for stunt shoots—but is adaptable to broadcast TV.
This weekend’s race is the only planned use of the rail cam right now, but Fox sees the potential in using it for coverage of other NASCAR races and even different sports.
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SportTechie Takeaway
This is the latest in a series of innovative approaches to camera use by Fox Sports and presents opportunities for the future of the network’s sports broadcasts. The rail cam’s use in motorsports is intuitive—both the sport and the camera move along a track, after all—but the system could also be used for football broadcasts that follow the play from new angles as the action moves down the field.
The network installed super slow-motion cameras for its 2017 World Series broadcast, capturing action at 1,500 frames per second. Earlier this year, for the Daytona 500, Fox Sports employed cameras mounted on drones, visors, hats, and in the track itself to capture the race from every conceivable angle.