Too bad Auto Club Speedway might go the way of the dodo bird after this season, considering it was the site of an epic race in Ford v Ferrari … that was supposed to be taking place at Daytona International Speedway in the actual movie’s plot.
I kid, I kid. Yes, Fontana’s trademark blue walls stick out like a sore thumb during the “7000+ RPM, Go Like Hell” scene intended to represent the 1966 running of the 24 Hours of Daytona, but that would only annoy a die-hard racing fan who would notice that sort of thing (me … and a bunch of others).
The James Mangold film, helmed by the man responsible for the upcoming fifth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise and the man behind classics like Logan, Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma, is with little competition the best racing narrative film ever made. Le Mans, Grand Prix and a couple others come close, but this week I thought about the evolution of racing films, documentary and narrative, through the years for different disciplines of motorsports.
Now, I won’t pretend I’ve seen every single racing film or even all of the hallmarks of the subgenre, but I think I’ve seen enough to potentially provide an overview of the disciplines’ evolution. I’ll probably omit a few for brevity’s sake, but I’ll absolutely name-drop any pertinent to the sub-subgenre’s importance.
NASCAR
Sure, we had a couple mildly forgettable pseudo-biopics in the 1970s with 43: The Petty Story and Greased Lightning, then The Last American Hero and then a movie that hasn’t aged super well with Stroker Ace. But in 1990, NASCAR was put on the cinematic map with Days of Thunder. Not perfect by any means but pretty gorgeous to look at, it’s essentially Top Gun with racecars, directed by and starring the same pairing that had worked on the plane-based film four years earlier.
Three years later, Tony Scott directed an utter classic with the Christian Slater vehicle True Romance (as someone who works in radio, I’m obligated to also recommend Pump Up the Volume here) and made films for nearly two more decades, and Cruise continues to be at the forefront of true action blockbusters.
But Days of Thunder never fails to get its share of ridicule from fans and non-fans alike. Yes, it’s a pretty silly movie at times and there’s plenty of continuity errors to it, but I’ll be damned if by the end of it you don’t feel like you’re right there in victory lane with Cole Trickle. Maybe…
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