#RUSH RACE MOVIE DRIVERS#

The producers could not source some key cars, so Howard's team commissioned Ligier-Matra and Brabham-Alfa replicas with Rover V8 engines.

Most other marques of the era were also represented by at least one example. The film features a fabulous array of real cars, with two McLaren M23s, two Ferraris (312T and 312T2), two Lotus 77s and two six-wheel Tyrrells-converted from 1977-spec to 1976 with replica bodywork-among the star performers. In fact, the Nürburgring visit led to a fundamental shift in the way Howard planned the film over the next few months, with more emphasis on real racing action and less on re-creating it afterwards via technology, reflecting a reallocation of the production's tight budget. Between seeing how hard they raced in the HF1 race and then what they were able to do for us, I began to think we may be able to push this thing a lot further and do a lot less CGI than I expected.

#RUSH RACE MOVIE DRIVERS#

“This was not our stunt guys or precision drivers this was just the owners, and we got some great stuff. Howard and crew were surprised how hard the historic racers drove their priceless cars, something they hadn't anticipated. I looked at the script and thought, 'What can we do with these cars that could be useful?' We didn't have a Ferrari, but we had a McLaren and a few others.” “We found that a lot of the historic drivers were willing to hang around and drive, and we could record them cruising around they were willing to do some lightly choreographed overtakes and things like that. We were going to shoot some plates of the track and thought we would be able to use them in a lot of CGI shots. “We had a small skeleton unit, and we covered the historic race. “The learning curve got a lot steeper, but a lot more exciting, when I went to Nürburgring for the first time,” Howard recalls. The following day some competitors stayed behind to run on the Nordschleife for the cameras. The plan was to capture the FIA Historic F1 Championship cars in action for some test shots, mainly to give the digital effects crew a starting point. Ron Howard and his team had their first taste of what might be possible in August 2011, some six months before principal photography began, when they attended the Nürburgring Oldtimer meeting. Rush draws much of its authenticity from the many original 1976 F1 cars, including the McLaren M23-8, the actual chassis James Hunt drove for much of the season.

Rush race movie