Genuine Formula 1 cars raced by top drivers including James Hunt were used to recreate dramatic scenes in the movie Rush — after today’s top engineers made them run like new.
Producer Andrew Eaton said the film, which charts the rivalry between English playboy Hunt and Austrian Niki Lauda in the Seventies, demonstrated “cutting-edge British engineering and cutting-edge British film-making”.
“We had this amazing tent filled with crazy boffins and half of them were trying to make cars that were 30 years old run as race cars and half were trying to put cameras on these cars.
“It was a potential recipe for major disaster.”
But you could see the team, which included Alastair Caldwell, Hunt’s team manager and chief mechanic in 1976, solving the problems, Mr Eaton said.
“It was like the BBC’s Great Egg Race but with much higher stakes. We had the ambition of 24 historic F1 cars roaring away from a starting grid. If you lose an hour’s filming it’s £100,000. But we made it happen.”
Some replicas were created. But the production team spent a year attending classic Formula 1 events and networking with associations, motor sport engineering firms, owners and F1 drivers from the Seventies to find and restore the originals seen on screen.
Some of the car owners lent vehicles on one condition, Mr Eaton revealed. “They said, ‘Can I drive the car? And can my girlfriend be in it?’”
The producer, who is known for a string of films with Michael Winterbottom including 24 Hour Party People, is keen to reclaim the $50 million movie as British despite having an American director, Ron Howard, Australian Chris Hemsworth as Hunt and German Daniel Brühl as Niki Lauda. He said: “All the rest is British. It’s a British writer in Peter Morgan [of The Queen], a British producer and a British subject, mostly. And most of the Formula 1 teams are based in the UK.”
