I have relatively recently gotten into motorsports after years of really not being interested, because all I had access to was NASCAR. The NASCAR variety of “regular oval track of regulation size with everyone just turning in the same direction” never grabbed me. When I played racing games on consoles, I played games which, well, had turning to both the left and right, and consequently that’s what I wanted in motorsport. So, I was curious about things like Formula 1 and – even more than that – the 24 hours of Le Mans. An endurance race that required a car to run for 24 hours straight, requiring them to go very fast and to have a good fuel economy so you don’t need to pit as often to refuel. Having access to Formula 1 through ESPN+ has got me watching that (the Shift+F1 Podcast also helps), and this has also lead me to seek out movies on motorsport – particularly the docudrama Ford vs. Ferrari.

As the title of the film says, the focus of the film is on the time when Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) persuaded Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) that what Ford really needed to do to turn their business around is make race cars – and what would help sell them would be to win the 24 hours of Le Mans. After an attempt to straight up buy Ferrari goes disastrously, Ford decides to kick the ass of Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) instead, by making their own.

To do that, they brought in Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), the only American to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans at that point, to design a race car to use to win the race – what would be the GT40. Shelby brought British racing driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) with him as a test driver and ultimately the lead driver for the Le Mans race itself. Through all of this, Shelby also has to contend with institutional inertia and conservativism within Ford, represented in the film by Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas).

The focus of the story in particular is on Shelby and Miles, with a couple of detours to Iacocca’s point of view early in the movie, with him fading into the background to let Beebe serve as the primary antagonist. Damon and Bale have tremendous chemistry together in the film, and do a tremendous job of conveying the two men’s close friendship. It’s not quite at the level where I’m going to AO3 to see if anyone shipped them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is slashfic for this movie and those two people.

The writing of the car development scenes also feels great – as someone who has enjoyed watching Top Gear a lot over the years, the scenes of Shelby and Miles talking about the GT40 feel like it could have come out of some of the best bits of Top Gear. The entire scene of Miles and Shelby discussing the prototype GT40 on the airport after Miles took it for a test drive could just as easily come out of the mouths of Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond (or Chris Harris and Matt LeBlanc).

Ford vs. Ferrari presents the racing scenes tremendously well – both in terms of the sound of the race itself, and also how well they are edited, and how the film conveys the passage of time in the 24 hours of Le Mans itself. This came out the same year as 1917, and beat it for sound and film editing (1917 wasn’t even nominated for editing). The direction, dialog, and editing do a tremendous job at presenting a sense of continuity of the race, making sure that the audience knows where Ken Miles is in the race at pretty much any time (which is particularly tricky for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where people are getting lapped all the damn time.)

If the film has a stumbling block, it’s by making Beebe into the personification of all the bureaucratic and institutional obstacles that Shelby and Miles faced, he ends up turning into a form of Walter Peck, and not in a good way. He becomes too cartoonishly malevolent. This isn’t to say such people don’t exist, but I think having those obstacles rendered into the form of one person downplays what Miles and Shelby had to overcome.

Otherwise, this is an excellent movie – both as a character and narrative piece, but also as a film about motorsport. Am I going to go watch other corporate biopic stories like Air after this? No. Not really. Stuff like Air doesn’t feel like a story about basketball as much as they’re a story about selling stuff – this is a story that starts off about selling stuff, and becomes a story about motorsport.

Currently, Ford vs. Ferrari is available for streaming on Hulu/Disney+, and for purchase from Amazon.com (affiliate link).

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