Peter Larsson, the in-car camera master who revolutionized racing on TV, retires

A 30-year-old Mike Joy popped a three-quarter-inch cassette tape labeled “1980 Hardie-Ferodo 1000” into a video player and began watching touring cars dart around Bathurst’s famed Mount Panorama circuit.

Though the road racing was entertaining, Joy’s jaw was soon on the floor for a different reason. During Australia Channel 7’s broadcast of the race, the screen suddenly cut to a live in-car shot of a driver named Peter Williamson, who was narrating the action for viewers as he was driving. Not only that, but the camera moved to follow the action during a pass.

“Holy s—!” said Joy, who was running the Motor Racing Network at the time and later went on to become an iconic NASCAR television broadcaster, currently with Fox.

As Joy recalls, he placed a call to CBS lead announcer Ken Squier immediately.

“You’ve got to come over here,” Joy told him. “I’ve got something you have to see.”

There are varying accounts of what happened next, because memories of 1980 are a bit hazy now. But the end result was this: Just months later, at the 1981 Daytona 500, CBS brought in-car camera pioneers Peter Larsson and John Porter over from Australia to put their technology into a NASCAR stock car.

The experiment went well and, by the end of 1983, Larsson and Porter decided to stay in the United States to found a company called Broadcast Sports International (BSI), which has since become a major player in the sports TV industry (particularly in auto racing and golf).

“I’d like to say we had a huge plan, but we were just a bunch of dumb young kids,” Larsson said. “Somehow, it turned into a real business.”

Larsson retired on Wednesday after more than 40 years in the industry, and those in the NASCAR TV world described his impact as invaluable to racing’s popularity. He didn’t just pioneer the early on-board shots but kept on top of the technology and pushed it forward with BSI over the decades.

“Peter has still been doing this at the highest level,” Joy said. “He should have been on the Landmark Award ballot for the (NASCAR) Hall of Fame, because no one has made a bigger difference in the way we consume racing on TV.”

Said Fox Sports director Artie Kempner: “In the 75th year of NASCAR, he’s been as instrumental and influential on the sport as anyone you can imagine because he’s created the heroes we watch on TV and allowed us to see what they’re doing through their eyes. Nobody had done that before.”

At a retirement party for Larsson this week, some of his various technological innovations from over the years were on display for guests. The early in-car cameras weighed 50-70 pounds, which came with its own problems at the time (some feared the camera could come loose in a crash and strike the driver).

Larsson had been working at a TV station in Australia as an engineer and watched the transition in how news footage was gathered. Motorcycle riders used to pick up tape from on-site crews and rush it back to the station for developing, but then-new microwave technology began to allow cameras to record from anywhere in the city thanks to antennas atop tall buildings.

Together, Larsson and Porter adapted the technology to racing. They figured out how to use a helicopter flying above the racetrack to gather the on-board footage. Williamson was game to be the guinea pig for the first one, but since he didn’t know when the director was cutting to a shot of his car, he had to talk for the entire race.

“He was the Rick Hendrick of Australia and owned dealerships, so he really understood the marketing potential,” Larsson said. “His lap times were fastest when he was talking. And he had verbal diarrhea.”

Joy, Squier and others were wowed by the in-car footage of Williamson, and American viewers soon had the same experience for NASCAR races on CBS. Over the years, Larsson kept driving innovation with smaller and lighter cameras and also was responsible for the wireless (RF) cameras used in various sports, from racing to golf to sailing, in addition to the pylon cams used in football.

BSI has even worked with NASA since 2000 to show space walks and live footage from the space station.

“The only thing that’s constant in this business is change, and if you can’t deal with that, you need to find work somewhere else,” Larsson said. “You never really get the chance to become too comfortable with one technology before you have to go out and learn something new. It’s like every day is Christmas and you get new toys to play with.”

Though you might never have heard of Larsson, those in the TV industry regard him as a legend. He was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2018 and has won eight Sports Emmy awards.

“Peter is a genius on so many levels,” Kempner said. “He not only understands what is needed technologically but editorially. He really gets racing. It’s not like he’s just an engineer toying around with all these gizmos and gadgets and cameras. He’s someone who understands it doesn’t matter if you have an in-car camera unless you put it in the right position.”

NASCAR fans are familiar with the various in-car camera angles, whether looking out the window, over the driver’s shoulder or staring back at the driver from the dashboard. They know about the roof cams, bumper cams, foot cams and “doggy out the window” cams, as Joy called it. Larsson and BSI are responsible for all of those innovations, as well as the helmet visor cam that was used up until this year.

Andy Jeffers, who grew up in the in-car camera world (thanks to his late father, Lyn) and has since made his own mark in the field as the owner of Sports & Entertainment Media, which helps Fox and NBC secure sponsorships for NASCAR’s in-car cameras, said Larsson is the “modern-day Thomas Edison of in-car cameras and RF.” And Jeffers echoed many others in describing Larsson’s character.

“There’s not one speck of arrogance in him,” Jeffers said. “He’s just humble, genuine and intelligent. He never says, ‘You’re an idiot. No way you could put that there.’ He listens to you and what your needs are, and then they’d go formulate a plan.”

The plans could have been bigger, Larsson said, if there was unlimited money. Innovations are exciting but still have to be weighed against the available budget. That meant Larsson would often start a project “without all the bells and whistles” to see if it worked before going all-out with it.

“One of the things I used to say to clients was, ‘You give me $10 trillion and I’ll give you the first video of man landing on Mars. If that’s not in your budget, let’s walk back and see how much you want to get,’” Larsson said. “There’s no point in spending a couple million on a camera that will be used once. You’ve got to work out what things will have legs.”

Much of the early brainstorming took place in bars, Larsson said. He and his co-workers joked their file folder in the old days was all based on cocktail napkins, “because that was where all the designs were.”

That approach, like the industry itself, evolved over the decades. Now 66, Larsson said he’s ready to leave BSI in younger hands. It’s simply time, he said.

As for what he’ll miss? The people, of course.

“The TV industry is very interesting, because you go to a venue in some city with 100 people you’ve never seen before and they become your best friends over the weekend because you’re working 12 or 14 hours a day with them,” he said. “Then you have the show, you high-five each other, go have a beer and it’s onto the next one.”

(Top photo of Larsson: Courtesy of Andy Jeffers)