Should have been titled "Drivel"

Rating: Null/10 (6 June 2001)

This movie purports to be about Champ Car racing, and in fact is nothing of the kind. This is a movie for people who have never seen a race and who think that race car pilots are incompetent, immoral idiots who can't drive five feet without hitting something and, despite the fact that every single car crashes during every single race, no one is ever hurt or killed and the cars, apparently, can be rebuilt instantaneously, for free.
There are so many errors in this movie that there is no way to know how to begin to catalogue them. Just in the crash scenes alone, I must point out that Champ Cars do not become airborne when they crash, unless perhaps their inattentive crews have installed the wings upside down; the sole purpose for the wings is to create downforce and stick the cars onto the track so they will NOT fly. As for the Fire In The Pond sequence: methane does not burn with a visible flame, and water extinguishes a methane fire. No one in a Champ Car race would reverse on the track to go and aid a fellow pilot; that is why medical crews are employed (and this is not 1973 Formula One). And there are specific rules against blocking other drivers. The main objection to racing Champ Cars on city streets at night is that Champ Cars have no lights; the secondary one is that the downforce of the cars would suck the manhole covers up into the air and hurl them into the passing traffic and the crowd, causing enormous carnage and a lot of lawsuits. No professional pilot would race a Champ Car without any protective gear at all, far less without a helmet. And those cars don't belong to the pilots, they belong to the teams. Both those guys would have been arrested, jailed and fired for a stunt like that race down the city streets.
I could go on, and I do among my racing friends. But suffice it to say that this movie fails on every single test of Must See: the characters are cardboard cutouts; the racing is unbelievably bad and inaccurately portrayed; the details of the tracks are wrong (and in one sequence "Detroit" is clearly and correctly labeled "Chicago"); and for the final indignity, Stallone is claiming now that he did his own driving, much to the outrage of the three Canadians who in fact did all the stunt work (Stallone did only such driving as he could do being pulled behind a camera truck).
This movie ranks right up there with "Plan 9 from Outer Space." Where are Crow, Servo and Joel when you need them?