Peter Starr And The Wild History Of Motorcycle Camera Cars

In the early '70s, Peter Starr began filming motorcycle racing's unique brand of insanity, but it was impossible to convey the exhilaration of riding from the sidelines. The solution? Film from behind the bars. Now 75 and semiretired, Starr made his first attempt at Ontario Motor Speedway in 1974.

“It wasn’t that exciting, but other people thought it was because it hadn’t been done before,” Starr says.

The problem was perspective. Starr’s wide-angle lens made everything seem slow and easy—far from the intensity he knew from his own days as a racer. He wanted the sensation of being there. In 1977, he got it.

That year, Starr and Kel Carruthers built a machine for Mike Hailwood to ride at the Isle of Man.

“It was an 8-and-a-half-pound film camera hung over the front axle. The fairing had been recreated by Kel to stand that weight, and we had microphones on it. It was pretty neat for a race bike.”

Starr’s Take It to the Limit shows the machine tangled in wires with a battery pack duct-taped to the tail. Hailwood rode the rig during practice, giving audiences a taste of what riders experienced lap after lap.

Starr kept learning and building, transitioning to larger platforms. A 1985 Honda Gold Wing with a revolving rear seat was his go-to until he was invited to help film Lethal Weapon 3. Directors wanted more gear and more crew to ride along, so Starr built his final rig to carry 1,200 pounds.

It meant designing a new front suspension, and a sidecar that rode on car tires. The bike had onboard video so the rider could see what was in the frame, and a radio that could patch in the director. But while the machine could adapt to almost any filming demand, it couldn’t conform to ever-tightening budgets.

“People are now looking for the best way, the cheapest way to do this,” Starr says. “By the time you’ve paid for the car, the driver, delivery, you pay for all the other stuff you’ve got to pay for, you can get a drone to do the job, and it’s easy by comparison. With drones, directors can sit in an armchair, literally, with a screen and direct from there. I think that technology has finally put the camera bike pretty much out of ­business.”