My favorite stop after seeing movies based on true stories is History vs Hollywood. It often answers all my little queries. As it did for this one.
If you’re interested in the actual story, there’s an excellent documentary on Prime/Netflix right now called “The 24 Hour War”: The 24 Hour War (2016) - IMDb
Excellent recommendation!
And the first talking head in the film is A. J. Baime, who wrote the book I referenced upstream.
RACING CARS by Piero Casucci (1980) mentions the 1966 Indy race re: the Lola-Fords, with Ford-Cosworth mills similar to the Ford GT-40. “Jackie Stewart almost won the 500 that year. He was in the lead ten laps from the finish, but a sudden drop in oil pressure forced him to switch the engine off (at that time the engine cost $26,000).” With inflation, that’s about $205k now. Yes, switch it off! Sure, the 1st-place purse was substantial, but it’s zero if you don’t finish because the engine goes kablooey.
Incidentally, there is a ‘perfect replica’ Porsche 550 Spyder. It seems the only way to tell it from an original is by the serial number. The engine is an original Porsche 550 Spyder 4CAM. The engine alone costs almost $500,000.
There seemed to be a bit on an anti-MG feeling to it; at the beginning, anyway.
That drove me nuts, too. Why do directors think that racing drivers are keeping some speed in reserve, and the winner is the one who decides to go faster at just the right time? It’s a race; they’re already going as fast as they can. And does there always have to be a pass between the final turn and the finish line?
For the ultimate in car-geek cred, did anyone notice if they were spinning the knockoffs the right direction depending on which side of the car they were on?
I should remember the cars at the beginning, in the scene in Ken Miles’s shop. I don’t remember what the customer was driving, nor what the car was on the lift. I think one of them was an MG. I don’t think that scene was ‘anti-MG’. I think it was ‘anti-people who buy sports cars and don’t know how to drive them’. Miles told the customer that the customer didn’t need a sports car. The way the customer drives, he needed a family car.
Actually, if they are sensible they’ll be going as slow as they can.
And he’s the professor, he should know!
Yeah, the asshole customer at the beginning was driving an MGA 1500; Miles’s wife even comments on it. And at the first race at Willow Springs you can overhear someone saying that Ken Miles had been driving “a piece-of-shit MG that he built himself”.
C’mon, we all know that the asshole customer would have been driving a Jag.
Yeah, and a good quote from Prost, but I still think the last turn of a 24-hour race is the wrong time to try and find out if you can go a little faster. I’m sure the idea is to try and show the skill of the driver, rather than having a faster car, is what wins him the race. The things that real drivers do (conserving tires, outbraking a rival into a corner, etc.) are harder to show and harder for non-racing-fans to understand. But everybody can understand stepping on the gas pedal to go faster, so that’s what they show. I still think it’s lazy filmmaking.
In real life, Miles and Lloyd Ruby won the 1966 Daytona 24 Hours by 8 laps.
I saw it portrayed as more of a risk-reward type of choice in the movie. You could go at a safe RPM, or you could push above and risk engine failure for some temporary extra speed, which could risk you the whole race. So it’s not that they were holding back speed, but they were gambling and trusting the car to be able to handle more than the normal safe limit by pushing it more than they normally should. I don’t know enough to know if there’s any truth to that with real cars from that period.
From what I’ve heard, endurance racing in that era was very much about getting the most performance without breaking something. Multi-car teams could have one car running a faster pace, another being more gentle on the equipment, and hoping that one of them would win. The movie touches on that just a bit, but not enough. But that strategy plays out over the course of hours; stepping on the gas in the final straightaway is pure Hollywood.
When Ford wanted to engineer the finish at Le Mans, with all their cars crossing the line together, I wonder why they didn’t tell their second-place car to slow down. The third-place car was 12 laps behind. They could have gotten the photograph they wanted and not affected the result.
And Miles’s son is shown watching the race on TV. I don’t remember the 24 Heures du Mans being televised in the States when I was a kid in the '70s. It’s only been in the last few years, with the proliferation of cable channels, that I’ve been able to watch it. Was there any way to follow the race in real time back in 1966?
I found the differences between this film and the doc on Netflix (The 24 Hour War) rather startling. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention in the theater, but I had the impression 1966 was Ford’s La Mans debut. In fact, the GTs were stinking up the course in the two previous years. The other interesting tidbit is that Miles’ car was Ford’s designated “rabbit”. He was supposed to drive hard to wear out the other teams early in the race even at the risk of a poor finish or not finishing at all. No one expected that car to be in the lead on the last lap.
The doc I watched noted that 1966 was the first year the race was broadcast live in the US. Kind of a 24 hour TV commercial for Ford.
I was being a little bit tongue-in-cheek there to be honest, as was Prost to a certain extent because “as slow as possible” sometimes also means “I can’t go any faster”. Certainly when you are Senna’s teammate.
I raced a red ‘66 Ford GT-40 back in the late 1960’s. I never lost a race.
Sure, I was only 10 and the car was a slot car, like this. I raced the neighborhood basement track circuit and I kicked ass, until the magnetic engine burned out (it died on the home stretch of my last race).
The Ford GT-40 was a rock star to us pre-adolescent kids back then. I look forward to seeing the movie.
The full 24 hours? That amazes me. I was just getting into racing back then and mostly Indy cars but the only races I can even remember being on TV here were Indy and the Daytona 500. It boggles the mind that with only 3 national broadcast channels back then, one of them would have given up a full day of programming for “just a car race”. Did Ford have that much clout? Or that much money?
I’m wondering if maybe they just broadcast the start and finish live? Even today, the nighttime hours are hardly ever shown live even by second-tier sports channels, and there wasn’t anything like that back then. And there isn’isn’t much to see when cars are on an unlit road course at night.
My $0.02, another Boys-with-Toys movie that’s all about gearheads with very little real characterization. Bale comes off best, mostly because of the scenes with the son, but the movie managed to be both “exciting” (in a propulsive, visceral way) and incredibly boring, with every rebel/underdog trope getting hit, beat by familiar beat. The night driving stuff was genuinely terrifying but ultimately, the final product was incredibly forgettable to these eyes. Still, I expect it will walk away with an Oscar or two (most notably, the Editing and Sound categories, which Grand Prix won 50 years earlier).
It was a good reminder that Ray McKinnon should really be cast in everything, if that were somehow possible. He always delivers the goods.
Given that the film was just shortlisted by the Visual Effects branch of the Academy for the Oscar, that’s almost certainly untrue. While there may still be a lot of practical effects, no film ascends to that status in the awards campaign without some significant (if invisible) CG.
Hmmm, saw this one this weekend. The weird, nonsensical quote about 7000 RPM just kind of boggled my mind. Someone who has driven a car should have talked them out of including it. Even if Shelby did actually say it (and if he did, I’d lay down money he was on mushrooms), it’s bad poetry at best. If he had a good poem in him, it was the one liner “My name is Carroll Shelby, and performance is my business.”
It was good technically, the race scenes were pretty well done (Shelby saying “now” when he probably couldn’t see that part of the track was silly, though), and the story was actually pretty good for a racing movie. But repeating that nonsense quote and making the Ford folks so petty and 2d against their own race team made it a much worse movie.
That, and the fact that even a novice driver has a pretty good idea when you should start to accelerate out of a turn. It’s not some mysterious sense that only top drivers like Shelby and Miles possess. I remember in that scene, as Shelby said, “Now,” thinking, “Duh. Of course now.”