A good movie or documentary can have a lasting impact

Movies and documentaries can be more than entertainment; they can strengthen or even ignite a passion. A recent racing documentary made me reflect on how I have been influenced and educated by specific projects over the years.

The first one had everything to do with timing. Until the early 90s, my interest in baseball was centered solely on the Boston Red Sox. That was the norm for a kid growing up in New Hampshire. As a bonus, being a Red Sox fan taught me the meaning of seasonal depression and the experience of having your hopes dashed before your eyes at a very early age.

I also grew quite frustrated with the sport and debated ignoring it entirely for my long-term health and wellness. Then I got my hands on a VHS copy of Field of Dreams. Any ideas I had about abandoning my days of being a baseball fan vanished.

The Red Sox were terrible from 1991 to 1995, but I still felt compelled to watch the game. Field of Dreams had me caught up in the romantic notion of baseball, what it had been, and what it could be again. I kept score like James Earl Jones’ character, I built a ballpark in my corn–no, wait, that was just the movie.

Lucky for me, my cable TV plan included TBS, which aired nearly every Atlanta Braves game. The team featured one of the best pitching lineups the sport has ever seen, including a pitcher named Tom Glavine. Glavine was from Billerica, Massachusetts, which was also home to one of my best friends at the time. So following the Braves was easy and fun.

As I began following two baseball teams—one on its way to the top and one struggling to get to its feet (although they would be back at it by the end of the decade)—a documentary about the sport further cemented my interest. Ken Burns released the multi-part docuseries Baseball in 1994, and I couldn’t get enough of it. The way he told the game’s story resonated with me, making me enjoy every pitch that much more.

Now, anyone who knew me from 2000 to 2004 knows that I would have been a more normal, well-adjusted person had I stuck to my original plan to abandon the sport. The Red Sox of those years drove me to previously unexperienced levels of stress, rage, and, ultimately, uncontrolled tears of joy and incredulity.

Twenty-plus years of suffering and disgust made the dramatic defeat of the Yankees on the night of October 20, 2004, and the final victory over the St. Louis Cardinals seven days later to win the World Series worth more than if they had always been winning. But damn, that was a rough ride.

Growing up, I had always loved cars and racing. I gravitated more towards NASCAR in my younger days because it was readily available on TV and at a track near my hometown. As I got older, it gave me a fantastic reason to get wildly drunk with friends while celebrating our favorite driver/beer–go Rusty Wallace in the Miller Light Ford!

Formula 1 was a sport I was aware of but never closely followed. I knew who was winning in F1 and what the big-picture storylines were, but I rarely watched a race or knew much about anyone other than Michael Schumacher.

Throughout the 2010s, I started following F1 more closely, and the TV coverage and availability of the series gradually improved. This was also the time that I encountered the documentaries “Senna” and “1.” Released in 2010 and 2013, respectively, they remain two of the best racing films I have ever seen, and I could not recommend them more.

They both teach you about the sport’s heroes and history, while making the current form more intriguing. To see what the early years of the sport were like—the incredible pace of development and, unfortunately, death—was truly eye-opening. I began watching more races, even though finding them on television was still not easy.

Then the explosion came with Drive to Survive on Netflix. I have talked about the show in other posts, so that I won’t belabor the point here. But needless to say, that series has done more for the popularity of this worldwide sport in America than anything I can think of.

I don’t think an American driver winning the F1 world championship would have attracted as much of an audience as Drive to Survive has. It is such a spectacular success that every other major sport has created or is trying to create its version of it. Even golf–yes, that’s right, golf.

For some, the show focuses too much on the people and the soap opera-esque drama off the track, and I get that if you are a hard-core race fan. But the compelling stories that land with an audience and make them want to care are inevitably the human ones. Knowing that, Drive to Survive nails it.

For people who want more on-track action alongside their off-track, personality-driven drama, I suggest another documentary: Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story, narrated by Keanu Reeves. If you are not a fan of Reeves, his narration may get on your nerves, but hang in there. The story he tells is so fantastical that you may forget it’s all true and actually happened.

I had only a vague recollection of the Brawn GP team when I saw the documentary’s thumbnail on Hulu. The only thing I really knew about the team was that Jenson Button drove for them. I like Button; he’s a talented driver with a great personality and has been doing a lot of sports car racing recently, so I figured I would learn a bit more about his time in F1.

The story of the car, team owners, managers, and drivers is so spectacular and at times, outlandish, that if it were a movie, you would laugh at the absurdity of the script. If you haven’t watched this series, I implore you to check it out. Even if you are a casual fan of motorsports, the drama of this team —how they developed their car and ultimately won a championship — is genuinely superb.

The story could probably never happen in today’s F1, but it could happen in other series. It is a testament to the underdog and the drive of people to do their absolute best regardless of the odds. The documentary is precisely the kind of blend of information and excitement that makes you want to watch more, learn more, and ultimately follow the sport more.

Most recently, I watched the racing documentary American Thunder: NASCAR to Le Mans on Prime Video. It doesn’t have the same impact as some of the others I’ve mentioned, but it is a fantastic behind-the-scenes look at the project that captivated the sports car world and seemingly every fan at the 2023 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The task of taking a NASCAR Camaro and turning it into a machine capable of lasting the entire race at Le Mans and matching (or in many cases besting) the speeds of the other cars on the track was no joke. That group did a phenomenal job, and the documentary is very good at bringing the viewer into the team to see how it all played out.

So the next time you are in an endless scrolling loop trying to figure out what to watch, just think of a subject you already enjoy and then find a documentary about it. There’s a good chance you may find something that enhances your love of the subject, or one that makes you stick with something you were about to abandon.