rnhaas

6/10

Spoilers

I grew up in a world in which car racing was very much not a thing. In, I think, second year university, I was introduced to car racing through a friend who got me to watch a film – I believe it was Driven – and attempting to watch a NASCAR race. I was horribly bored. I had seen Days of Thunder as a kid, too, and was horribly bored, so I guess I was vaguely aware of NASCAR before then but it made no impression. (Also, the Molson Indy. But I was mostly aware that it was noisy.) But, due to Jenn, I have now been an F1 fan for 10 years. Now, I will watch a documentary about anything. (And I mean anything.) But my impressions and experience of a documentary about car racing are likely very different now than they would have been 15 years ago. I can imagine this particular miniseries being way more satisfactory to me before I was an F1. Because, you see, now I have (barely intelligent) questions about car racing that I wouldn’t have had before. My first problem with this miniseries is that, though it is 4 hours long, there’s not a lot of scene-setting here. We just jump into 28-year-old “kid” Dale Earnhardt winning rookie of the year and then, before we know it, his first championship. There’s no discussion of what he did before until much later and there’s no discussion about the history of NASCAR. One interviewee notes racing was all there was to do sports-wise in the southeast. (Though he doesn’t say when. I’m not sure that applies to 1979 given that, you know, the Atlanta Braves had existed for 13 years at that point.) But that’s basically all the context we get. It’s pretty clear the people who made this assumed only NASCAR fans would watch it. And that’s a big problem for me. As a brief aside, Neil Bonnett is such a “Schlubby Dale Earnhardt” it’s hard to put into words. As Jenn said, he’s the baby of Dale Earnhardt and Stephen Harper. I wasn’t 100% sure a few times which of them I was looking at. That is weird. Anyway, there is a lot about Dale Earnhardt, the driver, as you might expect. And there’s a lot about Dale Earnhardt the (not great) father. And that part is good. But the problem with someone like me, who watches F1 and not NASCAR, is that I don’t know anything about NASCAR. And this series thinks that I don’t need to know much about NASCAR to know that Dale Earnhardt was one of the greatest NASCAR drivers ever and I find that really, really bizarre. Like all I know is that he was reckless and if he did this stuff in F1 a) he would have died much sooner and b) I don’t know how long he would have been in the sport. Max Verstappen is sort of the modern F1 equivalent of Dale Earnhardt and he’s so much less reckless. (As Jenn says, there are like 20 things in each of these races that would cause F1 to red flag them.) In F1, all the cars are extremely similar due to regulations but there are still cars that are far superior (in terms of minuscule differences in race performance) than others and teams that are far superior because of those cars. So there is a debate, always: “the driver or the car”? Like nature vs. nurture the truth is mostly in the middle but occasionally there are drivers so good they can get points in the worst cars and there are cars so good that drivers who shouldn’t be in F1 get points. I just watched a four hour miniseries on NASCAR and I have literally no idea about if any of this applies to NASCAR. I don’t know the points system, I don’t know the specs, I don’t know the rules about refueling and tire changes. I only know the number of races in certain years because they put graphics on the screen. The filmmakers just expect me to know it already because they assumed fans would be the ones to watch or they just figure I can read about it online. Regardless, it’s a big failure. You want everyone to know his story? Spend like 5 minutes each episode explaining some of the rules. You have four hours!!! I get it: the car that crosses the line first wins. 15 years ago, that would have been fine with me. But I know there’s strategy and I know sometimes that’s the team and sometimes that’s the driver and sometimes it’s both. And I know that, in some series, the car is more important or the driver is more important. But I don’t know that about NASCAR. (I do know they did some crazy shit to their cars during pit stops in the past and I have no idea how or why that was okay under the rules.) The other thing is that they don’t really sell the sport, at least until the end. These races are 400-500 laps, which seems so interminable to someone who watches races that top out at 70-ish laps (and are always roughly the same distance). They show these really brief clips of the races in the first three episodes. I’m not sure there’s more than 90 seconds of a single race in the first three episodes, in fact. So they’re telling us how great Earnhardt is and how great the sport is but they’re showing us that it’s only occasionally that theres anything to watch. For someone who grew up believing NASCAR was boring, that’s not doing your sport any favours. But they do fix this in the final episode with a certain race and then a certain second race, neither of which I knew about. If the entire rest of the series had been like that…it might have made up for the lack of explanation about the sport itself. The last episode almost made me think about catching a NASCAR race. (Albeit a road race. Ovals are soooo boring.) But the rest of the series sure didn’t. What the series does a good job at is telling Earnhardt’s story as a competitor and as a father and businessman. And that story is very interesting and compelling. And it’s worth watching this for that story. For something that [SPOILER ALERT IF YOU LIVED UNDER A ROCK in 2001] ends in tragedy, it has almost a storybook ending. I understand why someone thought this story could be a film. But a great documentary would be accessible to non-fans. And this just doesn’t make the sport of NASCAR accessible to non-fans.

FinFan

7/10

This is a good documentary about Earnhardt and everything around him. But as an outsider, trying to explain his actions did not redeem him in my eyes. I`m a racing fan since the early 1980s. NASCAR appeared on my radar mid 90s (it simply wasn't aired in my country earlier) so of course I know about #3 and, quite frankly, didn't like him. How many races he'd won, how many championships, for me those are numbers in a book. Statistics. It doesnt translate automatically to greatness because for me there is a certain kind of behaviour to go along with that. Just how I think a Juan Manuel Fangio or even Stirling Moss, with less or no titles to his name, is a greater driver than M. Schumacher was in F1, I don't see Dale Earnhardt as the greatest in NASCAR. The best ? Maybe. But not the greatest. It may be a controversial opinion but it's mine and I stand by it. Having said that, I never wished any harm to come to anybody and have seen way too many deadly accidents on screen and everyone sickened me. It's part of the sport but no fan wants to see that.