Race for Glory, the movie about the 1983 World Rally Championship title race between Audi with their quattro and Lancia with the Group B spec 037 is finally out. Obviously, we were seeking to watch it opening day and what we found was both good and bad news.
If you’re like us, then the bad news is that theater distribution is limited and no theaters near us were offering the film. Fortunately, in today’s age of distribution platforms, the movie is available as we speak via various streaming platforms. A quick Google search let us know it could be found on the following.
We ended up purchasing it from Amazon Prime, which was a bit more money than rental but assures we can go back and watch it over and over again.
As for the movie, it is in the end a racing movie, so can and should be critiqued for the reality of its racing scenes. It’s also “based on real events” but makes clear it takes license with those realities. It is not a documentary, and an interview with Daniel Brühl by Screen Rant revealed the priorities of storytelling over portraying the individuals accurately set about by the project. Brühl plays Audi Sport team manager Roland Gumpert.
“In this case, the part is much, much, much smaller. Also, the Italian said, ‘We want you to be free’ and they did not have contact with the actual people. I think Volker also didn’t have contact with Walter Röhrl. I think they did it deliberately to be as free and unrestrained as possible, which is fair enough.
“Because I thought if I meet Gumpert, for real, and he’s the nicest guy – I know that in the film, I have to be the annoying German competitor that sometimes can become a little bird. it can limit you so in that case, I accepted that the Italian said, ‘Create really your own Roland.’ But still I watched interviews and I read about him. So I knew who he was and is. I would be happy to meet him one day, because after I’d finished the film, someone in his team had contacted me and tried to contact me. But then I was deep into something else and it was too late. So now I hope that he will watch the film one day and hopefully like what I did. But it was a different approach this time around and to me it’s nice to see that I’ve done two race films and that’s it. I will never do another one.” – Daniel Brühl to Screen Rant
The plot of the movie focuses, as expected, on the Lancia project and namely team management. Audi, its quattro technology and Gumpert are the antagonists, with much of the storytelling minimizing their impact or even that of Walter Röhrl who is hired to race for Lancia. In as much, it misses a lot of the story of the people we believe to be the most interesting personalities in the space at that time.
Röhrl and his eccentricities are interesting, but hardly touched upon and somewhat confusing in the way they get a passing glance here. Michèle Mouton, though she does appear in the movie, really plays almost no role at all. There’s an odd scene where Röhrl hands her a rose at an after race party, something that probably pays a nod to their fierce rivalry in the then previous 1982 season. There’s also another scene where Mouton as a character helps fix Hannu Mikkola’s quattro when he can’t get it restarted, but beyond that there’s just not much at all. Hannu is the chief driving rival to Röhrl in the storytelling, and it’s true he was more of a title rival in 1983, but his character plays little more part than Mouton… which isn’t much.
Whatever the case, it’s still great to see this era of rally getting some attention, and there’ nothing wrong with watching 1980s quattros and Lancia’s mixing it up on the big screen.
