Considering we’re coming off a weekend at Talladega Superspeedway in which both Blaine Perkins and Daniel Hemric ended up flipping, this felt like an appropriate topic to touch on.
Perkins, of course, barrel-rolled six times down the backstretch, and Hemric slid down the turn 4 banking on his roof, the latter needing cleanup crews to roll the car back over. It marked the first time since 2016 that two different cars ended up inverted in the same race in NASCAR’s top three series.
Racing movies can struggle at times to execute crash sequences well, and nothing can replicate the real thing, of course. That said, there’s some pretty stark examples of both good and bad crash demonstrations in these productions.
I write this with the full admission that I may have missed one or two along the way, but I have good faith I’m including all of them. Any movies with more than one significant crash sequence have those scenes encompassed in one slot, and a franchise like the Cars films has all of its entries grouped together.
Most of these involve cars flipping (because what’s more spectacular for audiences than an automobile going end-over-end), but a few of them are a little more grounded (pun intended).
1. Rush
It certainly helps that Rush is the chronicle of Niki Lauda’s and James Hunt’s real-life rivalry during the 1976 Formula 1 season and that the crash sequence depicting Lauda’s accident is based off the real footage.
Of course, it takes a skilled director and crew to pull off a replication of such an incident, which Ron Howard and co. did exceptionally well here. The movie’s sequence takes up-close liberties, as well, but that’s all in service of the finished product.
It touches on the camaraderie of the drivers, as multiple competitors involved in the accident come to Lauda’s aid as his car burns, and the abject fear that Lauda no doubt experienced with some other close-ups of the cockpit.
The painstaking effort to replicate the actual crash is admirable, down to a couple of cuts to a fan filming with his personal video camera on higher ground in the trees — referring to the actual angle the crash was filmed from.
Rush does remain what I consider to be the greatest racing film ever made, so that probably helps its case here.
2. Grand Prix
There’s only a couple accident sequences in Grand Prix despite its three-hour…
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