Super Speedway IMAX

Just watched Super Speedway, which was originally an IMAX film covering the 1997 CART racing season from the point of view of Michael Andretti and the Newman / Haas team. They start off with the process of designing and building the car, from the clay model to the 5-axis milling machine grinding out the shape of a race car from a formless block, to the wind tunnel, to the track testing. Even though it's a bit old it's still a good window into how these cars are built. (CART car design has been fairly steady for the last few years as well.) The CART teams don't have $200 million plants and computer simulations that try thousands of different design possibilities running 24 hours a day, instead they have engineers huddled around a clay model using their intuition to form the initial shape of the car. They give a pretty good glimpse into how a wind tunnel works, with fluorescent paint sprayed on the car that changes colour depending on how much wind resistance it experiences at each point.

The real treat of the movie, though, is the on-board footage. When watching a race on TV you get footage from a tiny little camera and microphone that has to send radio signals back to the TV broadcaster. The teams would normally never stand for adding the weight and bulk needed to get a decent video image. But for this movie they equipped Michael Andretti's car with a high-quality camera and multiple microphones to pick up everything, from the eerie wind echo when he gets close to a wall to the rumble that overcomes the car when switching from a patch of new tarmac to the older road surface, something that looks totally smooth on TV looks like it might rattle the car apart when you actually see and hear everything in true detail. The best illustration of this is what happens when he spins the car on a road course. You hear the tires squealing, the breaks locking up, the suspension being pushed the wrong way and you nearly have a heart attack when you see the kerb approaching sidelong.

There's one sequence of some pretty spectacular crash scenes, which pretty much serve to make you wonder why any sane person would race on an oval track. The up-close footage also shows the skill required to get a turn just right, and how a slight over- or under-steer problem can totally throw a driver off his rhythm.

Even after more than a decade of watching CART and F1 I can say I gained a new appreciation for what the drivers go through having watched this.

OK, I just checked and you can actually download it from Suprnova.org. Definitely worth it even if you don't follow racing.