It was Martin Donnelly's birthday the other day. You're forgiven if you missed it, or if you had no idea who Martin Donnelly was, or is. An Ulsterman with a crook haircut Peter Beardsley would have blanched at, he was a F1 driver, quick in junior formulae, whose top-line career was stymied by arriving at Lotus at about the time the arse fell out of their operation. Saddled with a heavy, gutless Lambo and with a fading team living off former glories and about to lose their Camel cash, his 1990 season was already intensely miserable and literally pointless before round 14 at Jerez in southern Spain came round. Then this happened.
He lived. He never made it back to F1, and he never walked properly, but he lived, and he raced again. Went on to be a driver manager. Got a better haircut. Life finds a way, etc.
Fast forward 35 years and your correspondent was tasked with a mission as daunting as old mate figuring out how to walk again: watch the trailer for the new Bruckheimer-produced, Top Gun-remake-dude-directed F1™ movie, without hurling either lunch, laptop or self across room. Now, the F1™ movie is definitely of that big list of stuff that is Not For Me, and yada yada let people enjoy stuff and all that. All racing movies are varying degrees of hot dogshit - at best, they're plotless exercises in pretty period cinematography like Le Mans or Grand Prix; at worst, they're heinously scripted, catastrophically inaccurate fact-free farragos like Michael Mann's Ferrari or the Senna 'documentary'. When the best racing movie ever made is Talladega Nights (and then only the first half before it fucks off to become a Lifetime movie) you know you're in a genre girt by grim. Amongst F1 fans, anticipation is not high for the F1™ movie, despite (or probably because of) the names involved - Bruckheimer, Kosinski (no not the weirdo former Grand Prix bike racer), Brad Pitt and Lewis Hamilton. Frankly, it looks like it absolutely fucken sucks. But that's OK - it's not for us. This is not for the rusteds, it's for the Netflix Plastics (even if it is on Apple).
Your Correspondent got twenty seconds in before reaching the same conclusion as the highly esteemed journalists social media interns at Motor Sport magazine: they're lifting old mate's major, major sausage as a plot point in Pitt's pre-story character arc. A failed old coulda-been wastrel, run out of the paint for various indiscretions, reluctantly recruited back to mentor a young buck with all the promise in the world but all the self-control of Helmut Marko at a sacking-junior-drivers convention: the most original idea imaginable. Unless you've never watched Cocktail, or any of the literal thousands of movies to use the same trope. Including the worst racing movie ever made, Driven with Sylvester Stallone, a movie so bad it's singlehandedly responsible for the death of '90s Indycar, and which used the exact same beats in the exact same sequence.
They don't use the crash in the trailer, but there's only one reason you use that otherwise absolutely unremarkable Lotus-Lamborghini 102 in your historic establishing shots: because of that crash. Or because RJ Reynolds have paid heavy for product placement. Turning Donnelly's career-and-almost-life-ender into lazy character backfill for a Brad Pitt vanity vehicle is only just about stomachable because you know Donnelly just about survives the crash. But why not use anyone else's major major sausage? For this was an era of sausage manufacture on an industrial scale. There were no particular shortage of Big Ones. The year before at Imola, Gerhard Berger walled a Ferrari at Tamburello in a stack grimly similar to the one which would claim his old mate Ayrton five years later. Berger's bus even caught fire, in a far more realistic way than the laughable CGI shit featured late in the F1™ trailer. Spoilers, obvs. Is it just the startling visual of Donnelly lying in the middle of the road strapped to what was left of his race seat, his Lotus having bisected itself in time-honoured fashion - Lotuses having generally built to be fast rather than survivable since the days of founder Colin Chapman, to the fatal detriment of more great drivers than you'd want to think about?
You just kind of hope Donnelly gets something out of this, but you know he won't. Man lost his life's dream and hasn't been able to walk properly for 35 years, only to have his worst moment used for plot development in a movie with no plot. Bruckheimer better have bought him a nice birthday present.
