A good movie, just not a great car movie

Rating: 7/10 (25 November 2019)

Let me preface this by saying that I am quite a car guy. Not the type whose entire life revolves around cars, but I own a sports car and enjoy the odd track day. This means suspending my disbelief in a car movie is always a hard thing...
... but this movie certainly doesn't make it easy! For a car-movie aimed at car people, it was strange to find it packed with inaccuracies and car cliches. The idea that a car explodes whenever it rolls or makes contact with a hard object had finally died in most of Hollywood's mainstream products. Why bring it back in a car-movie?
Here are a few others:
-Ken's car seems to be so fast that he can catch up from with everybody whenever he decides to. Why isn't he winning in the first place?
-There's this cliche that racers can overtake each other in a straight line by deciding to press the throttle harder. Again, why aren't they already doing that?
-Brake fade and braking points obviously don't happen that way, and swapping out a knuckle assembly to cool the brakes is like buying a new phone because the home button is dead (oh wait...). Ford did come up with a quick brake-change solution (which almost every new car uses), but it looked nothing like this.
-the 7000rpm ramble present from the opening lines of the movie (and the movie's overall interpretation of RPM) is rather detached from reality. Different engine architectures behave differently at different RPMs, trying to pin that on a single value is strange and unneeded
-Sorry but car guys would never use "her" to refer to their automobile! It's not a ship!
With that out of the way, on to the movie stuff:
-the writing team tries very hard to make the story overly dramatic, by utilizing lazy writing tricks (the Daytona bet, for example), which really shouldn't be necessary considering how fascinating the base story already is
-Christian Bale is a very good actor, but he really overdoes the Ken Miles character. There is close to no footage of the actual guy, so he had the opportunity to build whatever character and mimics he felt like. Why he chose to go so incredibly over the top (both in accentuation and behavior) is beyond me
-There's a lot of CG going on during the races. Quite a lot. It is not badly executed, but was it really necessary? There are historic races at Le Mans they could have taken footage from rather than leave us in the uncanny valley
It's not all bad though. The story's a highly interesting one, and Matt Damon's performance is very good. His relationship with Ken Miles is touching, and having them compete against their own headquarters makes for a great double-sided challenge. And while the production's runtime is on the longer side of things, it never feels so.
To sum things up, it is a more than decent movie (hence the 7/10 rating), and probably does a great job at translating what car racing feels like to people who aren't into it or know little about it (my wife had a really good time and enjoyed the movie's constant suspense, as well as its visuals and performances, so it's got to be doing something right!). However, it's neither Oscar-Winning, nor even remotely accurate when it comes to car stuff.