Thanks for the comments. The first 1/32 camera car I built is similar to the one you described. You can see a small portion of the hood in the view, however, it is so close it looks like the video is cropped a bit. I plan on moving the camera back to see if I can get some sort of view of the roof/windshield. This car is an SCX, but it was just too slow to use as a pacer camera car and was causing too many crashes.
I was able to use this idea with a 1/24 scale car, with the camera sitting inside the car, having a small portion of the roof removed to expose the camera buttons for operation. This camera is just too big to get completely inside a 1/32 scale car.