The Racing Scene

The Racing Scene (1969)

90 minutes of racing action that takes you into the pit, the driver's seat, on to the hazardous tracks at Sebring, Daytona, Limerock, St. Jovite and many more!

The story of James Garner's year with his racing team, from the time he bought the car, and assembled his team through Mexico, England, Florida and Canada.

Date of release
1969-01-01
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (3)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Andy Sidaris

Casting

Interesting facts

The Racing Scene is a 1969 documentary film about actor James Garner and his auto racing team, directed by Andy Sidaris. The picture offers a glimpse of Garner's role and the teams and cars he sponsored during the middle of three years (1968-1970) his American International Racing team campaigned over a variety of racing series. The Racing Scene was the first film directed by Sidaris, whose background at that time had been in sports telecasting.

Background

In 1969 James Garner (born 1928) was a veteran Hollywood leading man of both film and television. At the peak of his popularity, he found his interest drifting from his acting career and into the sport of auto racing - in the day an extremely popular international scene in which he had played a starring role as a Formula One champion in the 1966 big screen hit Grand Prix.

Garner wasn't alone in pursuing auto racing as a diversion from movie and TV-making, being joined by such Hollywood figures as A-list star Paul Newman, a four-time Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) champion and number two finisher in the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans, and big screen action hero Steve McQueen, who raced both motorcycles and cars.

Driving Formula cars in staged racing sequences in Grand Prix gave Garner experience in high-adrenalin wheel-to-wheel racing. He caught the bug bad enough that following his 1968 race track training he formed his own racing team, and by 1969 was financing a variety of different platforms in racing series in North America, including getting some limited competitive time of his own behind the wheel.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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