If you look up “aura” in the dictionary, you’ll probably find the featured photo for this article — Kyle Busch on top of a movie-themed race car amid a cloud of burnout smoke at Darlington Raceway.
The 2008 season brought us a weird blend of movies on NASCAR bodies. Four more or less blockbusters — oddly, two of them starring Brendan Fraser — alongside a dumb comedy and a bad horror movie.
Not all of the movies were winners, but one of the cars did make it to victory lane.
Speed Racer
On the heels of the successes of the Matrix trilogy and V for Vendetta, the Wachowski sisters helmed the live-action Speed Racer adaptation in 2008.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen it since theaters, but it had one hell of a cast — Emile Hirsch, Hiroyuki Sanada, John Goodman and Susan Sarandon among them.
And ol’ reliable movie scheme guy Bobby Labonte ran a car promoting it at Richmond Raceway in the spring of 2008.
Labonte started 39th, but rallied to finish 13th.
Six days later, Stanton Barrett grabbed a top-20 qualifying spot at Darlington Raceway and came home 23rd. His car was more true to the source material, what with the yellow door numbers, but Labonte’s is the cleaner-looking of the two.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
About time we got to my all-time favorite.
Biased here, because 10-year-old me was a Busch fan and I loved the M&Ms schemes, but this still stands as my favorite out of the 150-some movie cars. I also grew up on the series and seeing this in theaters stuck with me.
Busch rolled off sixth but led 169 laps, nearly half the race, en route to a win at Darlington despite a ton of issues. He did so in a mint M&M scheme promoting Steven Spielberg’s fourth installment in one of his most beloved franchises — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
There were plenty of scuffs courtesy of the “Lady in Black” on the right side of the car, but Harrison Ford’s face on the right quarter panel remained unblemished … at least until Busch ripped it apart during his burnout. We have an ambiguous M&M on the hood clad in Indy’s hat, belt and whip, M&M characters with pith helmets and a Mayan-esque backdrop aligning with the movie’s setting.
The crew even had some fun and got dressed up beforehand, and Busch donned a hat and whip in victory lane.
To add even more goodwill, this was like the 10th movie I ever saw in theaters, and after revisiting the Indiana Jones series a couple years back when the new one came out, I think Crystal Skull was unfairly maligned. It’s such a fun movie and has what Temple of Doom lacks: Indy’s archaeological-detective stuff that makes those movies so great.
It’s also a grail diecast for many, though it’s shocking to me how badly the race-win version was executed. I was lucky enough to win the 1:64 on eBay a few years ago, but the 1:24 is gonna have to wait a while.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
The first of two movie cars driven by JJ Yeley within the span of a month, the Brendan Fraser vehicle made an appearance on the hood of the Hall of Fame Racing No. 96 for the summer race at Daytona International Speedway.
Well, until he failed to qualify.
I don’t hate the way the graphic looks, and I figure the constant movie partnerships for that car had to do with the “Movie Tickets .Com” decal on the quarter panel. The greenish-blue colors of the Journey to the Center of the Earth branding, though, fit nicely with the blue-and-green primary colors of the DLP scheme.
Swing Vote
A car that did qualify for the Daytona summer race, though the No. 96 robbed us of the rare two-different-movies-in-one-race event, was Martin Truex Jr.‘s No. 1, carrying a special patriotic scheme for Dale Earnhardt Inc.
This was to promote Swing Vote, a not-particularly-well-received political comedy that came out during the summer ahead of the Obama-McCain election in 2008.
Truex started 17th and finished 35th, as if the car couldn’t quite decide … almost apropos to the movie it was promoting.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
2008 kicked ass in terms of movie cars, particularly with Busch, Labonte and then with Ryan Newman‘s car at Chicagoland Speedway.
Newman came home 10th in this blood-red, gold and black car promoting the third film in the Mummy franchise, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. This was the second Brendan Fraser film to be on a car in ’08, as well as the second time a Mummy film was on a car (Jimmy Spencer ran one for the second film in the early 2000s).
It’s another one of my all-time favorite movie cars. The red-rimmed wheels are doing a ton of heavy lifting, but even besides that, the dragons snaking their way along the sides of the car are sick and the blend of colors looks badass.
Mirrors
Few of Alexandre Aja’s horror films have been well-received, and Mirrors was no exception. His second English-language flick (after his The Hills Have Eyes remake), Mirrors starred Kiefer Sutherland and got a whopping 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, but Aja did go on to make 2019’s Crawl, which is quite fun in its own right.
That didn’t stop it from popping onto the hood of Yeley’s No. 96, and he actually did qualify in that car … in dead last. Yeley finished 39th, but check out the hood on this thing. Definitely imagery that leaves an impression.
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.