Reel Racing: Looking Back at 2024’s Racing Movies

Welcome to 2025, everyone! As per usual — or close enough, as it were — I’ll kick the Reel Racing year off with a quick rundown/ranking of the past year’s movies (and a brief preview of what we know is coming up this year).

1. The Lionheart

I wrote at length about this early in 2024 when it released on HBO.

The Lionheart is a pretty emotional documentary about Dan Wheldon’s two sons following the same path the Brit did into racing … which, of course, means following the path that eventually ended with Wheldon’s death in the horrific 2011 crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

That said, it’s a pretty cool look at a family lineage continuing in the same line of work, in the face of/despite tragedy. I think it’s also a really interesting portrait of his wife, Susie, who had to suffer the loss of her husband and watch her sons begin their journeys into the exact same field more than a decade later.

It’s no Furiosa or The Substance or Hundreds of Beavers, and nowhere near my favorite movies of the year, but it’s a damn solid documentary and we seem to consistently get those. That bodes well for racing productions sticking around for a while.

2. I Am Kevin Harvick

To be fair, these TV documentaries can only do but so much in their hour (45 minutes with commercials) runtimes. But I thought I Am Kevin Harvick ended up being one of the better original docs FOX has done, and it kind of helped that this bridged the driver-to-broadcaster transition of Kevin Harvick‘s career.

Not too much to say about this one, simply because it’s a pretty straight-up, by-the-numbers documentary about one of the most accomplished recent retirees from the Cup Series. That’s complimentary, though, because it marks a pretty solid send-off for one of the greatest drivers of his era.

3. Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia

I never wrote about this one purely because there wasn’t much to say about it. It’s been in my bottom five of 2024 releases since early on in the year (not as incompetent as Madame Web or Founders Day, but close to them).

Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia chronicles the rivalry between the two manufacturers during the 1983 Rally World Championships, but in the most boring way possible.

I’m not sure what doesn’t work about this.

Rally racing is super entertaining, and I’d love to see a well-done sports film about it. We’ve had some decent shorts (Group B) and documentaries (GO FAST RISK EVERY THANG: The Wild Story of Ken Block’s ’22 Rally Racing Title Chase) in the past decade or so, so I was hoping this would deliver.

It has a couple fun moments. A couple of the racing scenes are good, and there’s a sequence where Lancia doesn’t have enough cars as are required and splits them between two lots for inspectors … kind of. They see about half of them, then they’re treated to lunch as a couple hysterical shots show those cars being hurriedly moved to another location, successfully fooling the inspectors.

I don’t doubt some of the historical accuracy, and it does a good job with the period-accurate cars and the recognizable Martini schemes on the Lancias, but even at just over 90 minutes of runtime, it’s a painfully dull slog that never really feels like it goes anywhere.

Even Daniel Bruhl, who was excellent in another racing film (Rush) and has a solid filmography to his name (from Inglourious Basterds to The Bourne Ultimatum to Marvel films) couldn’t save the movie.

Looking Forward

For 2025, there’s only one motorsports movie that we’re really promised, and that’s F1.

Brad Pitt in a big-budget, studio-backed motorsports film is a pretty sick concept, especially since it’s from the studio, producers and director that did Top Gun: Maverick. We’re getting a similar concept — small, high-def cameras fitted into the cockpits of Formula 1 cars like the crew did with the jets for the legacyquel — so I have all the confidence in the world that it’ll turn out pretty great.

Here’s to a fun, movie-filled 2025!

Adam Cheek

Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.