Last year, I watched John Frankenheimer's 1967 racing epic Grand Prix. It's a remarkable movie that both romanticizes and documents an era of racing that was unconscionably dangerous to drivers and spectators, but was also beautiful and exciting in a way that is very different from modern racing. The movie certainly finds something ghoulish about the culture surrounding racing at the time, and posits that drivers of the era must have been raging narcissists who would rather die trapped in a burning race car than go to therapy. But it also shows how different the race courses were, how each one had a distinct identity, and how drivers had to pilot crude, dangerous machines through these labyrinths with almost no margin for error. It was incredible stuff, and the very features that made it remarkable were also the ones that helped make it so deadly.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/epdw47/art-of-rally-fun-selektor-nostalgia-realism-impessionism
