If You’re Not First, You’re Last: The 10 Best Racing Movies

6. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

Director: Adam McKay

I am not sure a satire of a sport has ever been more wholeheartedly embraced by its community than Talladega Nights and NASCAR. The film gets its heart the same way most great movie satires do: from the inside out, grounding its parody in how drivers might make fun of themselves. Indeed, the selfish, doofy driver whose catchphrase is “If you ain’t first, your last” seems like the kind of NASCAR persona par excellence that could be reviled as easily as loved. But part of the brilliance of Adam McKay’s Days of Thunder riff is the all-time great comedy actor pairing in its center, with Will Ferrell as the titular Ricky Bobby and John C. Reilly (who was also in Days of Thunder) as his teammate, Cal Naughton Jr. What gives Talladega Nights so much juice is not only the incredible comedic talent of its stars, but its combining of the more ridiculous motor racing tropes (mostly poking fun at how cars drive and crash in movies) with a surprising amount of real-life flavor. For instance, Ricky Bobby’s famous invisible fire incident is a real thing that happened at the 1981 Indianapolis 500. 

Honorable Mention—Days of Thunder (1990), dir. Tony Scott: It would feel wrong for me to deride this famous failure too much, but also wrong to give it too much praise; what I will say is that while it is unbalanced, it features some of Tony Scott’s most electric filmmaking. 

5. Pit Stop (1969)

Director: Jack Hill

While Howard Hawks’ own stock car racing film Red Line 7000 wasn’t to my taste (although it is notable for being the first starring role for James Caan), the next best thing to that chameleon director is the “Howard Hawks of exploitation filmmaking” (according to Quentin Tarantino), Jack Hill. While better known for his more overt exploitation films like Foxy Brown and Switchblade Sisters, or the horror classic Spider Baby, Hill also made what is perhaps the greatest stock car film of all time: Pit Stop. Following a young up-and-comer dragster-cum-Figure-8 racer Rick Bowman (Dick Davalos) as he crisscrosses his way up the racing world against the haughty Hawk Sidney (in a career best performance from Sid Haig) and the old champ Ed McLeod (George Washburn). What Pit Stop excels at is its efficiency. Whereas something like Days of Thunder or Grand Prix bask in their excesses, Pit Stop is always on the meat—be that in giving drive-in audiences what they want (fast and hard car crashes on dirt tracks) or its constantly rolling narrative. Pit Stop, despite its outward stylizing, has some of the most realistic dynamics between racers, from how Rick and Hawk’s initially explosive antagonism turns into a mutual respect (not unlike Prost and Senna’s relationship towards the end of the latter’s life), to the way in which the dire seriousness of the sport ultimately undermines its vainglory in the film’s haunting final minutes. 

Honorable Mention—Red Line 7000 (1965) dir. Howard Hawks: The typically Hawksian stock car racing movie most notable for being James Caan’s first leading role, and is perspectively interesting for being one of the few racing films to give so much focus to not just the drivers, but their partners who have to sit and watch from the grandstands.

4. Le Mans (1971)

Director: Lee H. Katzin

It opens with a man driving around rural French roads. He steps out of his Porsche, it is Steve McQueen, and he is cruising the streets that make up the legendary, infamous Circuit de la Sarthe. Memory flashes over him as he is drawn back to a crash he causes on that very bit of track, killing a rival driver. If there is one canonized classic of motor racing that deserves its place (although, like the hero of the film, doesn’t quite make the podium), it is the absolutely stunning 1971 film Le Mans. Having no real dialogue for the first 20 minutes—and most of the rest of its runtime—Le Mans is real racing. Taking cues from Grand Prix, Le Mans filmed the real event, strapping its cameras to an actual competition Porsche 908 to race in the 1970 24 Hours. The drive for authenticity was so intense (perhaps so reckless), that McQueen, the sometimes-professional driver, wanted to enter himself into the race for real. It didn’t really matter that this aspect never came to fruition, as what we have is as intense, on-the-ground, and subjective as a racing movie that has ever strove for reality as we’ve ever had. The editing has an Eisensteinian rhythm, with every mechanical motion punctuated by massive metal bodies ripping over tarmac, where symphonies are created by the roaring engines, screaming tires and drum of heartbeats. If motor racing and cinema are contemporary inventions, Le Mans is analog apotheosis. 

Honorable Mention—Ferrari (2023), dir. Michael Mann: If there is one film that could unseat Le Mans’ place as the most authentic racing film by way of visceral montage, it is Mann’s 30-something year passion project about the founder of the greatest racing house in history and the 1957 Mille Miglia—but to avoid recency bias, I will let time decide Ferrari’s place in motorsport movie history.

3. The Tarnished Angels (1957)

Director: Douglas Sirk

The Tarnished Angels the most underappreciated work in Douglas Sirk’s legendary string of 1950s melodramas. Based on the William Faulkner novel Pylon, The Tarnished Angels is an exuberant and looming picture about life on the brink of death for airplane showpeople. New Orleans reporter Burke Devlin (Rock Hudson) gets to know a bohemian group of barnstormers living life from race to race. Their freestyling lives, however, are necessarily built on the death drive of their sport: Pylon racing, where single seater aircraft race around circuits in the skies, their wings kissing the massive protrusions standing above the lowland lakes nestled around the city. Hanging on for dear life in the sky is Roger Shumann (Robert Stack) and his parachuting stuntwoman wife LaVerne (Dorothy Malone), both actors giving the best performances of their careers outside of Sirk’s other great melodrama about phallic towers sticking out of the ground, Written on the Wind. While the general public might not at first think of winged vehicles when they think of motorsport, the DNA of plane and car racing is so intertwined that the former almost totally supplanted the latter in the pivotal post-WWI era—although both Henry Ford’s decoupling of the automobile from the ultra-wealthy and strange belief (which Ford did not hold) that the best way to sell cars was by winning big races were driving factors in maintaining the on-the-road racing’s popularity over that of planes. It was also (a little bit) safer. 

Honorable Mention—Top Gun (1986) dir. Tony Scott: The intoxicatingly fascist almost-sports movie that highlights many of the homoerotic overtones endemic to stories about men wielding machines. 

2. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Director: Monte Hellman

“Let’s make it fifty.” “Make it three yards motherfucker and we’ll have an automobile race.” No film has been more obsessed with the car, the road, and if either of them can really take you anywhere than Monte Hellman’s New Hollywood masterpiece Two-Lane Blacktop. If there is one word that the film brings to mind, it’s distillation. Characters are reduced to roles—the driver (James Taylor), the mechanic (Dennis Wilson), the girl (Laurie Bird)—or, in the case of Warren Oates’ character, simply the machine they control: “G.T.O.” The characters are exemplified by their lack of character, with the driver and the mechanic seemingly only able to talk about cars and how they work, and G.T.O. telling a different set of lies about his origin and how he came upon his Pontiac to every successive hitchhiker he picks up. It’s a purely existential American road. When G.T.O. and the driver/mechanic duo finally decide to race their way from the southwest to Washington, D.C., it never seems like the destination is too much on their minds; G.T.O. keeps dreaming up diversions to Canada or Florida, and the driver/mechanic don’t seem to want to get somewhere so much as they want to make sure the car can move. It is the closest an American movie not made by Michelangelo Antonioni has been to an Antonioni movie—it’s a completely lost kind of racing, not one for the sake of grabbing the checkered flag, but one for that destruction of the self that can happen as the body starts to fuse with a car running flat out, and in the final moments of Hellman’s film, the movie destroys itself along with it. 

Honorable Mention—Vanishing Point (1971), dir. Richard C. Sarafian: A favorite of Tarantino (he cast the lead car from this in Death Proof), and while its wandering, existential road has some profound reflections on freedom, the lack of a real race-y structure like Two-Lane keeps it from getting a full spot on this list. 

1. Speed Racer (2008)

Director: Lana and Lily Wachowski

If Two-Lane Blacktop is a formal experiment in minimalist motor racing, the Wachowski sisters’ Speed Racer is pure maximalism. Coming late in the era of digital backlot filmmaking pioneered by blue screen children’s movies like Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Speed Racer is an eye-poppingly vibrant cinematic tour de force. While Lana Wachowski said that they “were interested in Cubism” while making Speed Racer, I would not be the first writer to point to the film’s fundamental links with Futurism and the writings of the movement’s father, F.T. Marinetti. With its fluid composition, where images can freely flow in and out of one another, Speed Racer is by far the closest any film has ever looked to Futurist paintings of race cars. The Wachowskis’ early 2000s digital renditions of Futurist fascinations harken back a hundred years to the origins of the world’s dangerous obsession with these incredible new machines at the turn of the 19th century. I say “dangerous” not just because of what kind of death a racetrack could wrought, but because it is also quite literally interlinked with the origins and coalescence of fascist thought in the post-WWI world (see: Dr. Paul Baxa’s seminal study Motorsport and Fascism for an in-depth analysis). But by the time WWII ended, the basic nationalistic nature of the sport started to become more of a corporate fascism, as companies started to wield even more international powers than just what was once sanctioned by their patron states. Speed Racer, perhaps because of its wholly fictional world, is able to get away with a certain condemnation of these corporate powers that any movie seeking collaborations in reality have to forego entirely. In Speed Racer, the corporate interests are strictly the bad guys—they might have the money to sanction the racing, but they also fix it, and play the whole game as just another bit of stock price-fixing. And Speed Racer’s story only becomes more relevant as time goes on: In the final round of the 2021 F1 season, a late-race crash caused a safety car to bunch up the pack before the race director made a call outside the boundaries of the rules to allow the two title rivals to duke it out for one lap. Yet because the “underdog” Max Verstappen had pitted for fresh tires, he was able to easily pass Lewis Hamilton for the victory and claim his first World Drivers’ Championship—a story eerily similar to the accusations of corporate fixing shadowing the greatest Grand Prix victory of Speed’s hero, Ben Burns (Richard Roundtree). In an era when media is increasingly consolidated under a few massive multinational corporations seeking to churn out content rather than art, and racing is no different, Speed Racer feels like the definitive statement on the sport in both its form and narrative convictions.

Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.