This was probably the coolest event I’ve ever attended- for many reasons. A few I’ll save for photos, but the primary being it was a private, early showing of a movie I had been hyped for since the rumors of Ron Howard doing a Formula 1 film with a very historically accurate time line and especially so once I had heard Niki Lauda had contributed personal stories and memories to the script. When I found out Hans Zimmer was doing the musical score (if you don’t know who he is, and you like the movie Black Hawk Down- you love him and you never knew it), that was the icing on the sundae.
I had the pleasure of attending the pre-showing party at a motorsport garage in Danbury, CT. The hosting venue was very well supplied with delicious food, and many motorsport enthusiasts there were excited as I was to see the film. Entering the facility past a closed gate you were greeted with one of the most breath-takingly awesome sights:
Yeah. That Mclaren. I believe this was a spare/press car privately owned and raced in a historic F1 series that offered it to the venue as a showpiece. After a few minutes of oogling setting foot into the venue left no shortage of equally impressive masterpieces.
The venue itself owned a race team and on a turnstile had their previous season’s most successful vehicle from the team, complete with marbles still stuck to a majority of the outside panels of the car.
Sitting up front was one of Jacques Villeneueve’s Indy 500 cars, I believe a spare or press car in all it’s glory, with a Lola of some kind, and a Mclaren M2b(?) or some sort of 50’s/60’s era Mclaren F1 car. Space was tight and I was a little limited with my 50mm on my M3 in ability to take photos.
In the back where they did the majority of the work on their cars was something truly awesome, and surprised me the first time I saw it- thinking it was Ayrton Senna’s 98t but was in fact “only” Mario Andretti’s F1 JPS Lotus from the late 70’s.
Oh, speaking of Senna- did I mention they had one of his Mclaren era race suits framed in the back? Yeah. Nearly shit myself. Naturally, going through my old photos I noticed I had in fact ran out of light and space to take a photo of it with my Leica, and ended up taking a photo of it with my phone- buried on instagram here. Following a brief party here, we all moved out to the movie theater and sat down for a pre-movie talk from someone who had met Niki Lauda and had a personal (no pun intended) steering wheel that Niki had given to him following a race- and then followed one of the greatest modern motorsport movies of all time.
If you haven’t seen Rush yet, you’re doing yourself a dis-service. Fix that. 😀