The year of our lord 2015 was another drop in quantity for movie cars, though it did give us the first-ever time a NASCAR driver had directed a film.
More on that at the end of the article.
Besides the first entry on this list, it also might be the weirdest assortment of movies to ever land on NASCAR schemes.
Minions
It took until July 11 for a movie car to hit the track, but Carl Edwards‘ No. 19 carried Minions branding ahead of the Despicable Me spin-off that summer at Kentucky Speedway.
Edwards had far and away the best run of any car on this list, finishing fourth.
It also gave us this amazing photo of Edwards with the mascots at the track.
Straight Outta Compton
One of the first custom schemes I ever made in NASCAR ’15 was Tomy Drissi‘s car promoting Straight Outta Compton. Part of it was because it wasn’t a super difficult scheme to recreate, but the other part was because of how much of an oddity it was.
I’m kind of surprised this car even happened, given the target demographic for the movie and for motorsports are pretty disparate. The film is particularly excellent — especially Ice Cube’s son, O’Shea Jackson Jr., as his dad, and Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E.
Drissi ran this car at Watkins Glen International and Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course with the Parental Advisory-style movie logo on the hood and black banners along the sides bearing the names of the five members of N.W.A. — Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, DJ Yella and MC Ren.
Unfortunately, Drissi didn’t run the greatest in either race, starting below 25th in both. His best finish in the car was at the Glen, coming home 25th.
No Escape
A year after John Erick Dowdle made As Above, So Below — one of my all-time favorite horror films and a supremely underrated film, which combines found footage with Dante’s Inferno and the Catacombs of Paris — he made No Escape.
For some reason, this thriller, which starred Pierce Brosnan and Owen Wilson, found its way onto Brett Moffitt‘s No. 34 for Front Row Motorsports at Bristol Motor Speedway.
Perfectly whatever scheme, not too much to say about it. It’s okay. I’d definitely back off if I saw Brosnan aiming a conveniently-cropped-out gun at my from the quarter panel, though.
The movie didn’t do well critically, being called “borderline xenophobic” by one reviewer, and Moffitt finished a dismal 30th in the race.
Navy Seals vs. Zombies
I talked with NASCAR driver and Hollywood stunt veteran Stanton Barrett a few years back for the site. Barrett has an IMDb credits page dating to 1989, while his Racing Reference page goes all the way back to 1992. He’s been doing both for a long time.
Stanton Barrett directed his first film, Navy Seals vs. Zombies, in 2015, and conveniently had the outlet to promote it while running in NASCAR. The movie didn’t come out until October, but he first had the logo on the hood of his No. 15 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in July.
A couple months later, though, the movie got the full-car treatment with an elaborate, eye-catching livery at Dover Motor Speedway a few days before its Oct. 8 release.
Unfortunately, a wreck with Cale Conley led to the No. 15 getting torched. Not the highlight reel Barrett wanted, but it did mean the below video was the best look we got of the car.
Late in October, at Talladega Superspeedway, Barrett got to run another full-machine paint job, this time in a Truck Series Chevrolet.
The No. 91 is my favorite of the three, by far, and we get some scenes from the movie interspersed with a horror-esque theme. It’s pretty striking.
This one also ended up in a crash, though, finishing 29th. But it ranks pretty high on my all-time list of movie schemes.
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.