I went on vacation looking to relax, spend time with family, and take advantage with a racing movie. You know that one. Spoiler alert: Michael Mann’s Ferrari is not a motorsport movie. Above all, it’s a film about Enzo Ferrari’s extramarital affairs, which, scandalously, didn’t convince me. The most exciting component is when Enzo’s wife, masterfully played by Penélope Cruz, tries to shoot him in her office. This happens in the first five minutes, and Cruz’s remarkable functionality can’t keep the rest of the disjointed film afloat.
Thankfully, there’s a bigger racing movie out there right now, one that follows a team’s arc through a historic season, in a grueling form of motorsport that doesn’t get much love or media politics in the United States. , of course, about Race For Glory: Audi vs. Lancia. Directed by Stefano Mordini and starring Riccardo Scamarcio and Daniel Brühl as the leaders of the dueling team Cesare Fiorio and Roland Gumpert. The film recalls the 1983 World Rally Championship, the second season. of the changing era of Group B.
Fiorio is the star of the show, and Race for Glory follows his adventure as Lancia team leader as he faces tight budgets, a fragile and technically inferior car, the rear-wheel-drive Lancia 037, and a star driving force in Walter Röhrl, who is unabashedly uninterested in winning. Despite those challenges, Fiorio only focused on winning the championship, and Lancia retired from rallying after the 1983 season. (Second spoiler alert: That didn’t happen. )
Rallying is a strange and complex form of motorsport with all sorts of hard-to-understand rules. They’re far from the best, though: some of the subplots never connect literally, there are some confusing moments, and the pacing can be. . . Relaxed – Race For Glory captures the festival in a way that tickles the nerdiest among us without alienating the more casual viewers. For example, he devotes a scene to the homologation inspection of the Lancia 037, in which the company claims to have built two hundred road examples of this lightweight rally vehicle when there were only 103. Fiorio picks up and dines on inspectors as car carriers whizz by in the background and a popular and regulatory procedure becomes one of the film’s most memorable moments.
Then there’s the scene, at the Monte Carlo Rally, where Fiorio secretly adds salt to icy rally stages to help the rear-drive 037’s chances. Gumpert is furious and dismayed to find out that his competitor’s actions didn’t technically violate the sport’s rules. This leads to my favorite dialogue of the movie, where Gumpert accuses Lancia’s boss of skirting regulations, and Fiorio retorts that Gumpert should know the rules because he wrote them. It’s a David-and-Goliath moment that asks the question: What is fair play? And: Is there a moral difference between exerting influence and getting your hands dirty?
The film’s decision to focus on team leaders as central characters comes at a cost. I would have liked to see more drama between drivers Walter Röhrl and Michèle Mouton, who fought notably in the 1982 season in which Röhrl said he didn’t need to be the first boy in a motor game to lose to a woman. Mouton is rarely a character, only getting a few lines of discussion and appearing in action-packed race scenes. It’s a shame, because her story of competing at the highest point of the game as a woman may have been vital to tell here. By portraying Röhrl as an eccentric beekeeper and downplaying this debatable rivalry, Race For Glory missed a key storyline.
Still, the combination of Group B cars, team dramas and a well-executed film means it’s worth making a stop for anyone with a passing interest in rallying or ’80s motorsport. You can probably even convince your wife to see it. Also, like I did. So this weekend swap slick tires for studded snow and launch Race For Glory: Audi vs. Swipe. Lancia, which is now available to stream on YouTube, Prime Video, and Apple TV, or at your local independent cinema.
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