They stopped making most cars, but they still make Mustangs and this movie is obviously squarely in that market.
Is this movie kid appropriate?
There’s no sex or violence, and maybe a few swear words. Nothing that I could recall.
This was literally the ultimate dad movie. The IMAX screening I attended was packed full of middle-aged dudes and their wives. It was sort of weird not to see a single teenager in a full movie theater.
I hope to see it next weekend, but here’s a cool anecdote about one Anthony Joseph Foyt, who won the race with Dan Gurney in 1967 in the GT40. That car was built in the US unlike the one that won in 1966 and was driven by Americans.
Sports car racing[edit]
Foyt is famous for winning the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans race in his first and only attempt, in 1967; Foyt drove a Ford GT40 Mk IV, partnered with Dan Gurney and entered by Carroll Shelby’s team. Prior to the race, he had angered the French fans and press by remarking that the notoriously fast and dangerous tree-lined course was “nothin’ but a little old country road.”[7] Also, he reportedly only got 10 laps of pre-race practice. But when Gurney overslept and missed a driver change in the middle of the night, Foyt was forced to double-stint and wound up driving nearly 18 hours of the 24-hour race. Foyt also later won the 12 Hours of Sebring and 24 Hours of Daytona in 1985 driving Porsches, making him one of only 12 drivers to complete the “triple crown” of endurance racing.
Nowadays double stints are common. Back then it made you a legend.
Here’s a really good article that has the facts of the story without the movie embellishments.
Also… a lot of (really great) history of Leo Beebe here…
Excellent old footage here…
Good article. As I watched the movie, I suspected he was a little too glib of shorthand for the Ford bureaucracy that had to be overcome, especially at the end with the phone calls and the Shelby-Miles heart-to-heart. Locking him in an office and taking HF2 on a dangerous ride also was clearly fictional, but it was fun to watch. Reminded me of this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bpo8RDyOEWY
I’m looking forward to watching the film. The thing about racing movies is they almost always have to invent things where the truth is often even crazier than the stuff they invent. I think it’s hard for people today to understand just how dangerous racing was until the '90s. It still is… but the stuff these guys were doing in the '60s and '70s especially is just completely bonkers because they were cheating death weekly and inventing things daily. That’s why Mario Andretti, Dan Gurney, A.J. Foyt, the Unsers, Emerson Fittipaldi and so many more who survived that era and won consistently in all sorts of cars are legendary.
A lof of the Bebee stuff was kinda true–he repeatedly tried to get all of his drivers to “slow down” during the race, was peeved that Miles was pushing it, and endorsed if not fully imagined the finish–and reportedly learned what would happen with the result before the end of the race but didn’t want to communicate it to the drivers.
So while in the movie he comes off as a childish scumbag, he’s only a half childish scumbag I guess.
— Alan
Two thumbs up from me too.
One of my favorite parts of this movie was the technobabble. “I’ll get you banned from the SCCA!” Haha.
I also liked how they found a solution to Hollywood racing situations where you need both drivers to be neck and neck for a moment until the hero pulls away. It really worked.
I really enjoyed this movie. The acting was excellent by all players, not just the two main ones they highlight in the trailers. I have zero interest in cars or racing but by the end I was completely drawn in, and stack that on top of a really great story and… boom, great movie.
Loved the movie. I’ve seen it twice.
I am a car guy, but the inaccuracies did not bother me because overall how well they represented the period and the personalities.
Examples I loved:
The challenges of aerodynamic lift and brake-fade were very real. No other car had gone this fast, so they were on the bleeding edge of technology. In fact they were still flipping cars due to aero issues at Le Mans in the late-90s
There was several Daytona Cobras in the various shots. Never mentioned in the movie was Shelby had terrorized the world events the year before in the Daytona Cobra, one of my all-time favorite cars.
Nitpicks
The shots of drivers putting their foot to the floor in a dramatic pass. Doesn’t happen that way exactly. A dramatic foot movement like that does occur as you are laying into the power exiting a corner, but by the time you are on the straight the foot is held flat (for a very long time on the Mulsanne) and any pass that happens is a result of either good driving getting out of the corner, drafting, or your car is simply faster. Now all the talk about managing revs was very real. These cars were far more fragile than today, and they did have to manage how hard they would run the cars. However this is more about how you would shift the gears or maybe small adjustments on the throttle at top speed (so not very dramatic)
The film did not depict how sideways you drove these cars. The movie Le Mans does this far better. This is an element of drama the movie really missed. The scenes in the cockpit were far too serene IMO
I watched this movie today. What a beautiful piece of work. And I wouldn’t normally be comparing these movies, but I thought it was a lot more exciting, entertaining and moving than Rise of Skywalker.
It’s a shame that we’ve all heard of Shelby and McLaren, but few have heard of Ken Miles. I’ll remember him now though.
It sounds like most of the events portrayed in the movie were accurate, with a little dramatic flourish here and there, as should be expected.
Given the cast meh
This post is bad and you should feel bad
Watched this yesterday and I think the better title to the film would be “Ken Miles, awesome driver”
Everything else fell flat for me. I don’t recall a single thing that Carroll Shelby did to make any of the cars any better. He makes deals, he talks a lot and he fucks with the Ferrari crew, but all the key activities were done or suggested by others. Eg, brakes, bigger engine, carb. I was under the impression that he was more of an engineer. It wasn’t that it was a bad part, he just seemed more cheerleader and executive pit dude than actively contributing and I feel that’s a disservice to his legacy.
Ford was portrayed to be the lesser of two evils and it felt like they were pissing so much on Shelby and Miles that they should have just left and went with a different company. For me, Ford didn’t come out of this looking good.
I loved the driving and the everything around Ken Miles and that’s worth the ticket.
There’s probably a video floating around YouTube about how the movie got everything wrong.
They need to do a sequel about Roger Penske and Mark Donohue. They essentially met through the GT40 program. Donohue drove another GT40 in the '66 Le Mans race, but had a mechanical failure and only finished 12 laps. Plus his mentor and original co-driver (Walt Hansgen) had just died at Le Mans testing the car for that race. So him looking dejected and emotionally crushed on the sideline during the 1-2-3 finish would be a perfect place to pick up the story. Penske had the balls to make Donohue an offer to drive for him at Hansgen’s funeral, and they went on to many years of success in several different racing circuits. There’s a good dose of Bruce McClaren in the story, and a fair amount of flat-out cheating.
I was a huge Can-Am fan as a kid, and Donohue still has my favorite racing quote ever. It’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article about him, and I’ve seen it in different orders of phrasing, but it was when he was being shown the Porsche 917-30 he was helping develop for the Can-Am circuit. Porsche had been tweaking the turbocharged engine, and given it an adjustable boost knob that let the driver push the engine to 1500 horsepower for short amounts of time. This was a staggering amount of power in 1971-72ish, when the competition was running 750 to 800hp. One of the Porsche engineers jokingly asked Donohue if that was enough power for him, and he said, “No. It will never be enough until I can spin the wheels in high gear at the end of the straightaway.” After a little side track to win the 1972 Indy 500, Donohue dominated the 1973 Can-Am season driving that car for Penske, winning six of the eight races in a row. Then OPEC came along & Can-Am folded
Safety still lagged way behind power in those days, so like many before him, Donohue died in a Formula 1 testing accident in 1975.
Heck, after writing that long but still massively abbreviated version of those guys, I think it needs a Netflix limited series to do justice to their exploits together