Ever play a real racing simulator?
So reading the comments; most people that race don’t generally want to destroy their car.
And yes, you can drop gears down and floor it but there’s a high risk of all sorts of damage and your clutch won’t talk to you for days after. That’s why you want to bring your car on a trailer for track days. Also tires are expensive; burning through 2k in a day is rough.
Constant shifting is done for temperature maintenance often. Not everyone has a million dollar team to perfect everything.
I think while it’s cheesy, the first race in fast and the furious was slightly accurate when you start pushing the limits of your car and it starts falling apart. Vibrations get intense, sometimes you just back out; I did around 140 on a straight and I was like nah man you take win.
Lookup Lemons Races; it’s all about keeping your shitbucket from breaking down and not getting cooked(and yourself).
I also enjoy when they quickly pull up alongside then match speed and remain side by side rather than overtake.
poignant nod
And also shifting into 20th gear.
My favourite part is when they show the hero and his car is making fast car noises and he shifts like crazy going fast and drifting and yet the bad guy/cop is still tailgating him with his old beat up truck.
Pink nitrous exhaust flames on the girl’s car…
Somebody just watched 2 fast 2 furious 😤
The movie redline gets me so hype every watch.
It’s so funny how everyone here discusses how the race scene in this or that spy movie is unrealistic. Actually the most unrealistic thing is that the Chinese spy and the US spy would be racing to steal their secret in the first place, while in reality they would just seduce one another to steal their secrets. In a realistic movie, the bank robber wouldn’t race against the police either, he would just shut down his computer.
That’s why the Bond films are actually the most realistic depiction of spy craft, it’s mostly drinking, gambling and sex.
Well, cars smashed to hell and full of bullet holes tend not to continue running very long IRL. Movie cars are indestructible.
Can it be shut faster than three cops typing togheter on a single keyboard?
Shift gears again.
Shift gears agressively
Entire movie: “This guy always overtakes on the inside”.
Final race: “OH MY GOD! Is he overtaking on the outside?!? HE NEVER DOES THAT! He is! He is overtaking on the outside!!!”
Yes, it was a Nascar movie.
What do you expect from a ‘sport’ that’s all left turns?
For something they like to say is all about skill, they sure do spend a lot of time on the beginner track.
I maintain that Rush is one of the best racing movies ever made.
Both Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl were DEEP in their respective roles. And to top it off the score by the LEGENDARY Hans Zimmer.
The fact that it won no academy awards is proof that the Oscars are run by a bunch of idiots.
Meanwhile the F1 movie was terrible. It didn’t use the “oh, I’m behind, I better drive faster” trope, but it did involve the driver doing ridiculous things that wouldn’t have worked, and would have resulted in their being disqualified from the race.
I used to watch NASCAR with my dad as a kid (and play racing sims). There’s a lot of fuel, tire management, and drafting effects involved, so they actually don’t go all out at all times. It’s actually kinda interesting from a strategic perspective; just not interesting to watch, IMO.
Yeah. I don’t shit on NASCAR because of the skill involved. It actually does take a lot of skill. There’s a lot of strategy too. But, for the audience, you’re watching cars going around an oval at a fairly constant speed. Almost none of these skill and strategy decisions are visible to the audience. The driver may know when they move out of position and are no longer drafting the car in front of them effectively, but I’m sure 99% of the audience can’t tell.
You do realize there are racing series where cars have to brake hard, accelerate hard, turn both right and left. Plus, you don’t have to give up on the deeper stuff like tire strategy, drafting, etc. All that is still part of the sport, but you get the addition of regular exciting things you get to actually watch.
Heard stuff like F1 kinda sucks to watch in person because you just see a small portion of the track. Idk, I’ve never seen that or NASCAR in person. Have seen a couple Sprint car races which was kinda cool (tractor pulls and destruction derby’s too).
I haven’t watched a race in person, but I know someone who works for one of the F1 teams. He says that you see more if you watch on TV because you can’t see the entire circuit, but you can’t really understand the speed and power of the cars if you only watch on TV. The best compromise is to find a great spot at the circuit where you can see the cars braking hard and turning, but where you can also see a screen that shows action at other parts of the circuit. Unfortunately, the people who run the circuits know that’s the best place to watch and the best experience, so you have to pay a huge amount for that. If you just get a general admission type ticket, you’re probably going to have to watch somewhere where you can only see the cars zoom past, without any TV screen to tell you the state of the race.
And then they shift in a higher gear, allowing them to drive nearly twice as fast, because they didn’t think of that before
An infinite number of times too. I don’t know what’s more infinite in this world, the number of gears in a car in a fast and furious movie, or the number of bullets in their guns.
Drive, which is otherwise an excellent movie, has a car chase where you can hear a gear shift while they’re reversing.
A few cars had two reverse gears, and I think they were valued as getaway cars for that reason!
Old British war Jeeps -and probably others- had transmissions where you can go as fast backwards as you cwn forwards. You actually shift through the gears in reverse.
They shift gear and suddenly the car lurches forward… Were they in the wrong gear all along?
Well I think that when they’re drafting behind another car they may be in top gear and shifting down definitely helps to accelerate, just not maintain a certain speed.
Driving in top gear at 105 mph. I’m gonna need to really give it the beans if I have any hope to pass them. I increase throttle for the down shift, pop the clutch, increase throttle just a little more, pull too hard on the shifter and jam it into second. I slam on the gas but there’s a hard lurch, the tires chirp in agony, I weave around trying to control my car, and a rod launches from my engine.
Just when it seems like I’ll never recover, I grit my teeth, hunker down over the steering wheel with white knuckles, grip the shifter knob, and slam on the gas. My car makes a sound like a lawnmower misfiring. I engage my NOS and burst into flames then explode. Guess I won’t be back for the sequel, but I’ll be in the one after that.
That works well in real life when youre in top gear at 2-3k RPM and downshift and accelerate through 5-7k RPM.
In the movies theyre racing already and should be at high RPM basically the entire time, so if they downshift then they would just red line it lol
I assume that drafting allows them to drive a lower rpm than the front guy, so the car still has done extra from the overtake
You assume wrong, rpm correlates directly with road speed, so if you’re going a certain speed in a certain gear you’ll be at the same rpm, drafting or not.
What drafting allows you to do is use less throttle to maintain the speed (or go faster with the same throttle position).
Right, so what is it that makes them be able to accelerate past their opponent? More room for acceleration within the same gear?
Nothing to do with gears. When you’re drafting behind an opponent you can accelerate slightly faster than them because you have less wind resistance. You can also reach a higher top speed before the wind resistance is too much for your engine to overcome. Building up enough speed in the draft can let you make an overtake or get alongside before the next corner.
Whether it is actually an effective way to pass depends on the type of car and track. It’s an important part of many types of racing but totally ineffective in others.
Nothing. That’s the whole point of the topic. It’s all nonsense.
Stuff like that doesn’t happen in real racing. In real racing you usually pass someone by pressuring them to make a mistake or forcing them to make an opening in a corner. Some motor sports have boost mechanics like DRS or electric boost and stuff but those are limited to specific areas with specific rules on their use. It’s not the winning strategy usually.
Drafting is a huge part of most motorsports (f1 included) in real life. It just doesn’t look like the movies.
There’s also tracks which doesn’t let you maintain top speed. But the car in front can still keep blocking unless it’s a wide track (so basically some off-road racing I think)
This is really a metaphor for life.
Change gear and disappear
