Dan Timko says:
>I guess we should just all complain. Maybe they will never make a racing
>movie ever again! That way, we won't have to endure the pain. Oh wait, we
>are just a minute percentage of who they make their money off of. :)
My beef is simple: Stallone, the screenwriter, spent over a year getting
intimate with the F1 circus and another year (after Czar Ecclestone
demanded a licensing fee roughly twice the budget of the movie) with the
CART teams before production started. I would hope that he would have
learned SOMETHING about how the cars work, or at least that CART Champ Cars
use methanol fuel, which a) burns invisibly, b) is quite well-contained in
a fuel cell, and c) is completely miscable in water and thus exceptionally
unlikely to pool on top of a shallow pond, let alone catch fire there.
He'd have learned that they don't have on-board starters, and that show
cars never have engines or fuel in them. He'd have learned that there's
*one* designated communicator in the pits and sometimes a spotter on the
roof of the press box at ovals, and certainly girlfriends and ex-wives
wouldn't be able to talk to the driver in the middle of the race. But that
was too much to hope for, apparently.
>And I agree with the guy in one of the previous emails who was happy that
>they are at least MAKING racing movies. But maybe some of you would prefer
>to watch the new version of "Annie" than a not-so-perfect racing movie. :)
It's entirely possible that a really bad racing movie could do more harm to
racing than no racing movies at all. "Days of Blunder" didn't do NASCAR
any favors as far as countering the redneck image they were trying to shed.
Just the bizarre CGI wrecks shown in "Driven"'s commercials are a
disservice to the racing community.
>I for one, learned something: I never knew CART cars had 20 gears that
they
>could downshift into, which would propel their car ahead of the next car
>while the other car was supposedly already going top speed in a straight!
:)
Not only that, the drivers only run half-throttle on a superspeedway,
except when they need to pass someone...
Jim Crider
autojim@att.net
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