In a packed field, the old Formula One films maintain pole position

A new, big-budget movie about Formula One has been made with the explicit blessing of the sport’s overlords, and with all concerned saying this makes both the behind-the-curtain and behind-the-wheel action thrillingly authentic.

The director has a reputation for making suspenseful action films, with marquee names in lead roles, and his latest film is no exception. The film’s stars learned to drive almost-F1 cars at almost-F1 speeds, deepening the on-screen verisimilitude; cameos from current drivers and cutting-edge filming techniques also help in this regard.

But petrolheads are unhappy that their beloved apex cavalcade is being dumbed down to please a mass audience.

This is F1, starring Brad Pitt, directed by Joseph Kozinsky, who made Top Gun: Maverick with Tom Cruise, and who shot F1 in pit lanes and on tracks during race weekends.

But this is also Grand Prix, the 1966 film starring James Garner, directed by John Frankenheimer, who made The Train with Burt Lancaster and who shot Grand Prix in pit lanes and on tracks during race weekends.

Sixty years apart, the two films demonstrate the staying power of motor racing in cinema, with Grand Prix still considered by many to be the best example of its kind.

Today, Grand Prix’s racing scenes remain thrilling; F1 fans at the time were doubly bowled over because this was the first time they had seen footage of their beloved cars racing in colour; races were still broadcast in black and white then.

The off-track melodrama was and is less well-received; contemporaneous critics were harsh, and the reviews of F1 are hardly unanimous in their praise of the talky bits between the racing.

Grand Prix should have starred Steve McQueen, who wanted the leading role and the filmmakers were willing to give it to him, but the actor did not take to the film’s producer in a meeting and left the project. He started work on a rival Formula One film, with the working title Day of the Champion, but it fizzled out (the 2021 documentary Steve McQueen: The Lost Movie, expands on this missed opportunity, in granular detail).

McQueen, who competed in a round each of the British Touring Car Championship and World Sportscar Championship and also raced off-road bikes, went on to star in Le Mans (1971), about the eponymous 24-race.

If motor racing movies were lined up on a starting grid – fictional ones only, otherwise the 2010 documentary Senna takes the chequered flag – then Le Mans sits on the front row behind Grand Prix.

Three more recent films would come next: Rush (2013), about James Hunt and Niki Lauda competing for the 1976 F1 title; Ford v Ferrari (2019), starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon; and the microns-thin slice-of-life of Enzo Ferrari, Ferrari (2023).

A pair of NASCAR films, Days of Thunder (1990) starring Tom Cruise, and the lesser known The Last American Hero (1973), which gave an early lead turn to Jeff Bridges, have their fans, as does the rare film about a woman racing driver, Heart Like a Wheel (1983), in which Bonnie Bedelia plays pioneering real-life drag racing champion Shirley Muldowney, who won national titles competing against men.

Further back in the standings are a clutch of failed movie-star vehicles: Paul Newman in Winning (1969), Bobby Deerfield (1977) with Al Pacino; and Sylvester Stallone’s Driven (2001), unkindly but not incorrectly known as Drivel.

By far the most financially successful and popular motor racing movie is Cars, the 2006 Pixar animated film which spawned a franchise – two sequels, two TV shows and $10bn of merchandise in the first five years after its release.

F1 is already part of a franchise, an officially licensed product that is being marketed as F1: The Movie, perhaps to distinguish it from Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the Netflix documentary that takes fans inside the sport like never before.

In the penultimate episode of the third season, centred on Romain Grosjean’s crash at the 2020 Bahrain GP, a sequence of the French-Swiss driver in the fiery wreckage of his car, juxtaposed with the doom-laden recollections of onlooking F1 team staff, is truly gripping and moving.

In Grand Prix, Garner drives a car that has burst into flames, which he pulls over to the side of the track and leaps from – a stunt that went wrong but was kept in the final cut.

In F1, Pitt’s character Sonny Hayes endures 30 years away from the sport after an accident, shown using actual footage of Irish F1 driver Martin Donnelly’s near-fatal smash at Jerez in 1990 (Donnelly gave his permission).

Despite the new movie’s claims of authenticity, its present-day action is smoothed down by CGI and the governing body’s stamp of approval.

And its overall position in motor-racing movies’ classification? “I’ll just say,” warned current Williams driver Carlos Sainz, at the film’s New York premiere, “for the pure F1 fan, be open-minded to Hollywood films.”

F1 is in UK cinemas from 25 June

Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images