It seems only apt that the first big-budget, serious racing movie in a while — excluding Ford v Ferrari for reasons I’ll explain — comes out in a year where quite a few motorsports movies are celebrating anniversaries.
I’m talking about F1, of course, which had a TV spot air during Super Bowl LIX and projects the biggest mainstream star power in a motorsports movie since Days of Thunder did it with Tom Cruise 35 years ago.
Yes, FvF had Matt Damon and Christian Bale, but in terms of a pure racing movie, I wouldn’t be shocked if that one had too much manufacturer diplomacy for general audiences. F1 brings the team behind Top Gun: Maverick and the star power of Brad Pitt this time around.
There are a few smaller, straight-to-streaming productions turning five years old — Become Who You Are (endurance racing), A Life of Speed: The Juan Manuel Fangio Story (Formula 1) and Uppity: The Willy T. Ribbs Story (all the stuff that Ribbs raced) all turn five years old this year. That trio of documentaries saved us racing fans amid the limited motorsports we had to watch in 2020, even if the former two weren’t so memorable.
More notable are the productions hitting double-digit milestones this year. Let’s go back a decade, where 2015 boasted a pair of documentaries of real-life screen stars who also loved hitting the track. Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans told the story of McQueen’s foray into making a movie about racing with 1971’s Le Mans, for my money one of the best — and most underrated — racing flicks.
It’s an extremely engaging look at one of Hollywood’s all-time epitomes of cool (several more of those to come later) and how he brought his love of racing into a full-scale production.
Meanwhile, Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman showcases another one of the all-time coolest dudes to ever grace the screen and his passion for motorsports when he wasn’t reading lines. Newman did his own film, also called Winning, about the Indianapolis 500, but it was that movie that led Newman into his racing hobby off-set.
Let’s go a little further back to arguably the greatest racing documentary of all time in Asif Kapadia’s Senna, released in 2010. Kapadia accomplished the rare feat of expertly putting together a documentary without a single on-screen talking head, in terms of interviews done specifically for the movie. It tells the story of Ayrton Senna’s life, impact and legacy — as well as how his fatal crash unfolded — in just over 100 minutes. For my money, it’s one of the best motorsports movies ever made, narrative or documentary, and is well overdue for a 4K remastering.
Kapadia went on to craft his documentaries on Amy Winehouse (which won him an Oscar) and Diego Maradona in the same fashion.
I just started watching 11.22.63, the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s book about time-traveling to stop the JFK assassination. I feel like I keep jumping back in time doing this article.
Flipping the calendar back 20 years, we land in 1990, when Tony Scott had his second movie release in less than five months. In terms of modern-day Hollywood, that’s f–king CRAZY to think about. His first film in ’90 was Revenge (which celebrated 35 years on the day of the Daytona 500 this year), starring Kevin Costner and largely forgotten amid the rest of his filmography. It’s not great, but it’s gorgeously shot (shocker) and pretty well-acted.
NASCAR roared onto the big screen in June of the same year with Days of Thunder. The first time stock car racing had had big-budget, big-name representation on-screen came in the form of what has been called (both complimentary and derisively) “Top Gun on wheels,” since Scott had directed the air-based action film four years prior and it had also starred Tom Cruise.
Yes, Days of Thunder is flawed. Is it overdramatic? Of course. Does it have issues? Definitely! But it’s so much fun.
Speaking of issues, there’s probably no motorsports film I have more problems with than One By One, also called The Quick and the Dead, directed by Claude Du Boc in 1975.
Both titles are apt for the documentary and Formula 1 in that era. If you’ve seen that “1960s F1 experience” video that’s bounced all over Twitter, it’s kinda just that.
Been giggling at this video for days because it’s not even an exaggeration pic.twitter.com/I4buZXiPKE
— Prost Stan Account (@f1_headassery) February 16, 2025
F1 in that era, I mean. Not the movie. The movie is what I’ve long called borderline exploitative, in the sense that I realize it’s trying to show how dangerous the sport was at the time and how frequent driver deaths were. There were 12 fatalities during the 1970s alone.
That said, I really don’t think it’s a good tone-setter to start out with Tom Pryce’s infamous crash from 1977 (movie was released in 1975, but this was added for the secondary release in ’78) in which he and marshal Jansen van Vuuren were both killed. Let’s ease into it a bit more.
That documentary turns 50 this year, so I may give it a rewatch. Morbid, I know, but I’m curious how I view it five years onward from when I watched it.
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.