Life in the pits. A film festival, too.
The 90th Le Mans 24 Hours ran in June, turning roads into a grueling test of humans and their machines. Movies give a glimpse into the experience from the pits.
Read time: about 11 minutes. I’m back from the summer break! This week: Auto racing from the pits. Three racing movies. And, I promise, I’m letting cars rest as a topic for a while. Next week: Topics I plan to explore from July to October.
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And everything swarming with people, with men in blue peaked caps and women in flowing veils, their eyes alight as is from fever and always looking at a gigantic blackboard, or at a black or blue or white something that, one, two, three, comes and goes with a thundering din like the devil himself…; one automobile chases after another, often with two struggling side-by-side, roaring past the people. Farther, just farther. And once again new numbers appear on the blackboard; the public calculates. It calculates who in this titanic battle of horseless machines made the best time, who was the fastest…. The battle has been rolling on for hours already, kilometer after kilometer, lap after lap. A bitter contest. Already gaping blanks are to be seen on the board, for the least fortunate are gradually disappearing from sight, now lying along the way with broken machines or scuttled forevermore into the roadside pits…. There, a black point is approaching like a cloud, growing larger and larger, and the point becomes a rattling monster, lost in the howls of a thousand voices and surrounded by a thousand people shaking, in the uproar, the victor’s hand.
Wolfgang Sachs found these words in a news article from the Berliner Tageblatt of January 4, 1909, and began his discussion of “Victorious Speed” with it in For the Love of the Automobile. The unnamed Tageblatt reporter indeed captures much of the essence of an automobile race as seen by the public in the grandstands. There, the swelling din and blur of racing experience consumes the spectators and the contest is cast in laps and numbers. In the pits, among the tools, fumes of fuel and exhaust, and sweat, the focus is on engineering and mechanical challenges and the frailties and resilience of human energy and attentions.
I live within earshot of a race track — the Orange County Speedway — and in summer months, countryside sounds mix rhythmic rasp of the cicadas and undulating roar of the track. The asphalt-paved, three-eighths mile track has been the venue for PASS, CARS, and NASCAR events. In 1973 the little track hosted a NASCAR Grand National East Series event (the Orange County 100), where Buddy Baker took $1,000 home for his 267 laps in an hour, eighteen minutes and thirty seconds — achieving a track record of 76.528 mph. Besides Buddy, other big racing names have run the speedway’s oval over the years. But Rougemont isn’t a place of interest — livestock vastly outnumbers humans, I would guess — and so the track has sputtered a bit with occasional closures and gala reopenings. This summer I’ve noticed that the sounds have been less frequent and more muted than before, perhaps a slip in business.
From my garage, the track is a little over three miles away as the crow flies over dense woods, but I still don’t have to rely on the wind going in the right direction to hear race nights.
View from the pits and before
Sachs’ early twentieth-century newspaper reporter captured the perspective from the stands, but I’ve been able to get a perspective from the garage and from the pits. I’ve driven (as a trainee) at high speed around Virginia International Raceway — usually known as “VIR” — in a track-optimized BMW “E30” that had been honed and tuned in the Garage Mahal behind my house. The cars that have come out of its bays have won endurance races, and some trophies are displayed on the shelves. (My sons are to blame for my dalliances with racing, I have to say. I’m not the champion driver.)
The experience in the pits differs significantly from that in the grandstands, and I have to admit I find the pits much more interesting and exciting.
My favorite kind of race is the long endurance race — many hours if not a “twenty-four,” a complete day and night. Unlike the Orange County 100, such a race can’t be completed without pit stops and driver changes, and a long endurance race calls upon the broad range of driving skills and mechanical ingenuity. Days certainly pose different challenges on the track than the nights. Driver fatigue is an issue, of course, no matter how carefully teams pace driver times at the wheel.
An endurance race tests the mettle of the metal, too. Everything is breaking everywhere, all the time. So, what are you going do about it? You fix it.
The race sets a balance, a primordial tension of Things Just Falling Apart or Randomly Ramming Into You and Smooth Running, Graceful and Fast Driving. The fact is the most competitive teams contend with the Falling Apart. The key thing: When stuff happens, you fix it. This is the simplest test of a team, and it vastly complicates the array of talents that come together in the best endurance race teams. Either they do everything more-or-less well, or they fail. High stakes endurance racing (which I admit I’ve never taken part in) has similar challenges and of course much deeper pockets and wells of racing experience to draw from.
Probably the most celebrated and certainly the longest lived endurance race is 24h Le Mans, the 24-hour Le Mans. Definitely high stakes. Begun in 1923, the race ran its ninetieth time in 2022.
Three movies
Although they aren’t quite true to life in the pits, three films do attempt to tell the drivers’ stories and those behind the scenes. The earliest is Grand Prix (1966), the latest Ford v. Ferrari (2019) — both somewhat romanticized perhaps because they actually have a coherent narrative. Le Mans (1971) feels truest to the experience of racing, with its noise and disorienting movement, but the story itself recedes into the background. That was probably the point.
This past spring, my wife and I staged a film festival with the movies. (I was told later that I should also have included Rush, released in 2013 and directed by Ron Howard.)
I was eleven years old when I saw Grand Prix in “Cinerama” at the Cooper Theater in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. I had travelled to Minneapolis with a boys chorus (I sang alto), and the movie was a break for us. Before we entered the theater the usher told us, “When driving scenes come up, pretend you’re the driver and look forward. Otherwise you might get car sick.” He was right. Cinerama was in part a response to the intrusion of television on the movie-going audience. The movie industry fought the small screen with a huge one: powered by three synchronized 35 mm projectors, the Cinerama viewing area was a full 146 degrees wide. Grand Prix was a spectacle in 1966, and the Cooper Theater was then quite new, having opened in August 1962. I can’t recall whether the floors were sticky yet.
Grand Prix follows driver Pete Aron (James Garner) and, to a lesser degree, three others: two Ferrari drivers, one aging (Sarti, played by Yves Montand) and the other young (Barlini, played by Antonio Sabàto), and Stoddard (Brian Bedford), Aron’s former team mate. The story’s focus is Aron, who has gained the reputation of being reckless but, like the other drivers, has organized his life around racing cars and so he persists. In a sense, the story examines obsession and the kinds of tradeoffs people make, exchanging fidelity for the track or using a race car-driver identity to aggrandize. Aron comes across as the most stable person in the movie, and much of the film draws from his perspective. When I was eleven, I didn’t pick up on the points of the plot that hinted at adultery, jealousy, or revenge since I was interested mainly in the races. Grand Prix has a lot of those, since the movie progresses through the Grand Prix tour, as the four drivers of the story compete to be the World Champion.
Le Mans sticks with one race and focuses on a single driver, Michael Delaney (Steve McQueen), and the plot, for what it’s worth, hangs from his relationship with Lisa Belgetti (Elga Andersen), the widow of a rival of Delaney. Though other drivers people the movie, they ornament Delaney, who is at the center of the action. Belgetti blames Delaney for her husband’s death, so the feelings between the two is fraught and complex. But the sequence of events — which is actually a better description of what happens in the film — seems to me to be a framework upon which hangs the aura and the experience of a race. Parts of the film are a phantasmagoria of noises and settings that felt authentic and almost documentary. Indeed, they have reason for that, since much of the film was captured in the 1970 Le Mans race, including race-car footage.
As in Grand Prix, obsession animates the drivers in Le Man as well. The most remembered line from the film is Delaney’s: “Racing is life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.” (You can get posters and T-shirts with that saying easily on the web.)
Ford v. Ferrari appeared in 2019 and, like Grand Prix which won three Oscars, came away with two Oscars as well as a host of other awards and nominations. It tells a story (much embroidered, I’m sure) of the relationship of Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale) as they came together in a Ford-sponsored team to beat Ferrari at Le Mans. Ford v. Ferrari replaces obsession with revenge to some degree, since the core rivalry of the story — bitter competition between Enzo Ferrari and Henry Ford II — echoes throughout. In the relationship of Shelby and Miles, that rivalry moves productively, stuttering a bit as it negotiates tensions and conflicts, but resolving into a sort of love — a love centered around speed and the engineering of motion and then tragically cut short with fiery death.
Together, the three movies push men to the fore, unsurprising since racing has been predominantly a male undertaking. My daughter rather indelicately characterized the races that my sons participated in as little more than “sausage fests.” The stereotype of racing men has, indeed, been captured by Steve McQueen, whose licensing website proclaims was “a man’s man…, admired by men, loved by famous and beautiful women.” There is a McQueen kind of masculinity. But the men in Grand Prix and Ford v. Ferrari have more texture and complexity.
One can feel the impress of women’s rights and feminism by tracing the depiction of the women in the films. In Grand Prix, the earliest of the movies, Louise Frederickson (Eva Marie Saint) portrays a professional woman, a writer on assignment with little interest in either racing or the entanglements of romance. She does have an affair with Ferrari driver Sarti, however, which is a particularly complex entanglement tragically unraveled in the end. Mollie Miles (Caitríona Balfe) I would say has one of the best scenes in Ford v. Ferrari, when she turns the Miles’ family station wagon into her own racing machine. She drives it (perhaps not quite as professionally as Ken) as she angrily gets Ken back on board as her marriage partner and back on his passion for racing. Mollie is strong and smart, and obviously an important part of Ken’s own success.
So, how did the movies stack up in the little film festival in our living room? I was particularly interested in what my bride would think about them, since she has seen the efforts our back in our garage and finds the racing experience from the pits exciting and rewarding. We used the “Siskel and Ebert” method: thumbs up or thumbs down. I gave each of the three my thumbs up, my wife gave Grand Prix and Ford v. Ferrari thumbs up, but Le Mans got her thumbs down. “There was no plot.”
The Scuderia DeLong that was out back in my Garage Mahal
My feelings for racing, and for endurance racing in particular, are colored by personal involvements I’ve had, mainly on account of my sons’ enthusiasms. I have to admit that I have rather conflicted feelings about automobile racing now in light of climate change, but speed on a track and its challenge (and, yes, danger) is seductive.
We haven’t had a race car in the garage for a while, but my eldest son’s ambitions are stirring. He told me that he’s looking at an Acura Integra — old, dented and multicolored since it bears replacement panels from other cars, needing some wrenching, and still fitted with car comforts, meaning it still has upholstery and seats. Turns out, I knew the car and had driven it, since it had visited the Garage Mahal before. My wife and I even had to take it to a farm supply store once and had to push start it to get home.
He said I might be needed to paint it and provide it a place where it can be dismantled in peace.
Got comments?
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Garbo, Sandro. Steve McQueen In Le Mans: Art Graphic Novel - Best Sports Illustrated Classic Cars Graphic Novel For Adults, Teens, Kids, and Young Readers (Part 1) - English Version. Place of publication not identified: Garbo Studio, 2016. Some of the illustrations: Silodrome. “Steve McQueen In Le Mans - A Graphic Novel,” December 19, 2016. https://silodrome.com/steve-mcqueen-le-mans-graphic-novel/.
Yup, AI even weasels into car racing, at least the simulated kind: Wurman, Peter R., Samuel Barrett, Kenta Kawamoto, James MacGlashan, Kaushik Subramanian, Thomas J. Walsh, Roberto Capobianco, et al. “Outracing Champion Gran Turismo Drivers with Deep Reinforcement Learning.” Nature 602, no. 7896 (February 2022): 223–28. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04357-7.
I think she enchanted me when I was an eleven-year-old. Françoise Hardy plays a “beatnik lover” (une beatnik amoureuse) in Grand Prix. Getty Images controls the portfolio of the movie photos, but you can see a few on the web: Hardy in the driver’s seat and with James Garner at Monza.
The making of Le Mans was a challenge, and itself an obsession: Keyser, Michael, and Jonathan Williams. A French Kiss with Death: Steve McQueen and the Making of Le Mans : The Man, the Race, the Cars, the Movie. Cambridge, Mass.: Bentley, 1999.