Race cars are having a boon in 2023. Formula 1 is more popular than ever in the United States, which now hosts three Grand Prix. The centenary 24 Hours of Le Mans had three times as many entries in its top category compared to the year prior. Even NASCAR is expanding to new audiences with its debut of a street racing course in Chicago, creating an instant-classic race. Part of this success is due to the Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive bringing American eyes onto the top class of motorsport over the course of the pandemic, the rising tides lifting all cars with it. In that winter off-season of racing, and with the release of Michael Mann’s highly anticipated—and already divisive—Ferrari right on the horizon, it is high time to take a step away from the real cars and take a look back at the best movies ever made about them.
Here are the 10 best racing movies:
10. Senna (2010)
Director: Asif Kapadia
I have to start this list with an admission: I do not like Senna, even though I see why it grabs people. While Kapadia’s emotionally soaring use of archival material is striking, it presents a pretty extreme bias towards its subject matter; not just in an obvious way of taking Ayrton Senna’s side in on-and-off-track battles, but by skewing us away from what Senna might actually be thinking in order to win us, the audience, over. The most egregious example of this is the 1990 crash between Senna and his archrival, Alain Prost (whom the film likes to wrongly equate as being equally villainous as FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre, who did try to sabotage Senna on a number of occasions). This crash was a shocking repeat of the year prior, when Prost turned in on Senna at Suzuka’s Turn 1, giving himself enough of a points lead to secure the World Driver’s Championship. The next year at Turn 1 again, Senna would intentionally crash into Prost in much the same way Prost did the year prior. Senna wishes to downplay that last part, instead choosing to focus on what Senna would say at a post-race press conference: “If you no longer go for a gap—that exists—you are no longer a racing driver.” I put the emphasis here on the “that exists” in the same way Senna does when he spoke it, because what he is really trying to do here is convince people there was a gap that existed when, as was clear to anyone watching the race, there wasn’t. Senna is a well-made myth, but it would’ve been better served being a film about mythmaking.
Dishonorable Mention—Ford v Ferrari (2019), dir. James Mangold: The incredible true story of Ken Miles (Christian Bale) and Carroll Shelby’s (Matt Damon) push to get Ford at the front in Le Mans, and I agree with Michael Mann in saying the film didn’t have “a real ending.” Additionally, the distance the film takes from the interiority of its most interesting figure narrativizes the story away from understanding what actually makes these men tick.
9. Driven (2001)
Director: Renny Harlin
Originally intended by star Sylvester Stallone as a Formula 1 film, the filmmakers had to settle for the North American open-wheel CART series (also known as IndyCar racing, although at the time the film takes place, the owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway had split with CART, starting the competing Indy Racing League and taking the IndyCar branding with him—I digress). In some ways, this pivot was a saving grace for the picture. It gave the filmmakers substantially more access to teams, drivers and tracks than would’ve been possible with the much more prestigious and paranoid world of late-1990s F1. Renny Harlin renders the suitable melodrama of the lives of men living constantly on the edge of death—driven only by, uh, the idea of being driven—as pure operatics, complemented by a free-flowing editing style that bleeds space, time and raw speed into one visceral entity. Most surprising of all, based on its reputation, is how realistic the racing is compared to the likes of Days of Thunder, where overtakes look like one car has twice the horsepower of the other. Some might choose to poke fun at Driven’s early-2000s digital effects; after all, people have seen some gnarly racing done for real.
Dishonorable Mention—Rush (2013), dir. Ron Howard: Going for a similarly operatic approach to storytelling as Harlin, Howard fails to make emotional sense of his ellipses, and can’t seem to convey the script’s thoughts on racing until a protracted dialogue scene at the end.
8. Grand Prix (1966)
Director: John Frankenheimer
It’s famously remarked that John Frankenheimer had the choice in making his 70mm Super Panavision Formula 1 roadshow to be in the style of Grand Hotel or Test Pilot, with Frankenheimer opting for the former. It’s a bit more questionable, however, how successful he was at his Grand Hotel-esque narrative, with the films constituent parts of rip-roaring racing, an interwoven melodrama that sometimes bleeds back onto the track, and the sheer technical spectacle of it all vying to dominate the tone of the film. Despite this whiplashing, it would be impossible to say that Grand Prix is anything but a miracle of a film, displaying so much how-did-they-do-it racing footage that it still hasn’t been bested in the almost 60 years since its release. The off-track scenes make it clear that Frankenheimer’s directing attention was focused elsewhere in the movie, but the unrelenting spectacle of watching cigar-shaped Grand Prix cars run at top speed around Monte Carlo, the agrestic old Spa layout, or the infamous, rickety banked turns at Monza in unbroken takes is a sight for the books.
Dishonorable Mention—Bobby Deerfield (1977), dir. Sydney Pollack: The disastrously weird and overly sumptuous F1 melodrama at least stars Al Pacino in some fantastic racing suits emblazoned with his title sponsor Martini & Rossi.
7. Spetters (1980)
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Spetters follows a trio of Dutch teens as they try to make their names as motocross racers to escape their working class upbringings. Bikes are much more financially accessible than race cars, giving them the false hopes of bootstrapping their way into fame and fortune. While not up against the characteristically ultra-wealthy grand prix racers, their hero at the start of the movie and most sordid enemy by the end of the film, Gerrit Witkamp (Rutger Hauer), is first shown as a well-off dentist whose petit bourgeois comfortability gives him inherent advantage over the hopefuls. That class divide isn’t the only endemic quality of motorsport that Verhoeven gives a prodding too. Verhoeven also rips at the underlying machismo of motor racing, going as far to have the bikes be literal extensions of the boys’ crotches, and the loss of control of one having a direct effect on the libidinal energy of the other—in a typically boyish Verhoeven way, racing is just another violent, misaligned manhood. While the film’s legacy is largely taken up by the amount of controversy it caused in the Netherlands (so much that it got Verhoeven to head for Hollywood), it should be remembered more as a classic motorcycle racing film.
Honorable Mention—The Brown Bunny (2003), dir. Vincent Gallo: A movie with not quite enough interest in the main character’s career as a motorcycle racer to justify a place on this list, although luckily Spetters also features an unsimulated blowjob.
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.