So this definitely counts as a sports biography type though knowing nothing about the world of motor racing, I had hoped it really was about a showdown between two industrialists like the title says. Instead it’s about the two men hired by Henry Ford II to create a team that would win the 24 Hours of Le Mans in order to get back at Ferrari. This one suffers from the usual set of simplifications and the predictable story beats of sports dramas, but the racing when the film gets to it, is really quite good.

After winning Le Mans in 1959, Carroll Shelby is forced to retire as a driver due to health reasons to run his own car sales and engineering company. In 1963, Lee Iacocca proposes to Henry Ford II that they boost their image by having a winning car at Le Mans. At first they try to do this by buying Ferrari which has dominated the events for years but Enzio Ferrari uses their bid to get a better deal with Fiat instead and personally insults Ford. The enraged Ford decides to build his own winning car and team from the ground up no matter how much it costs and enlists Shelby to help. Shelby in turn recruits his friend, the British driver and mechanic Ken Miles. Though brilliant and skilled, Miles has an abrasive personality and earns the ire of Leo Beebe, a vice-president at Ford who keeps trying to boot him from the team. It falls to Shelby to navigate the convoluted bureaucracy of Ford while Miles works on the fixing the technical issues of the GT40 and proves himself to be the car’s best driver.

Usually when watching films, my wife and I notice that we love the first half of one just as they are setting things up but then it falls apart in the second half. The opposite however is true in this film as the first half is full of the standard character archetypes and tropes of the genre. Perhaps director James Mangold felt like he had to fall back on these shortcuts to effectively tell a story that involves so many characters but the fact is that it still feels lifeless and trite. Miles has a supportive and loving family, the Italians at Ferrari are shrewd, Beebe is the stereotypical evil executive and so on. I was disappointed in that they don’t go too much into the technical details of how they work to improve the car, offering just enough to show that Miles is competent. But the second half of the film is vastly better for the simple reason that this is where they pack in all of the racing scenes. Even if you’re not a fan of motorsports, they’re pretty great, being full of excitement and cool shots. It’s mind-boggling that a full race takes place over 24 hours and the film is great at showing that this is a test of stamina as much as skill both on the part of the drivers and the car itself. I feel that maybe the film exaggerates the carnage and chaos on the track but it does make for a riveting spectacle.

I am amused that the film swaps around some of the usual conventions of sports films. Sure the Ferrari team are their rivals and personally insulted the owner but the film also rather justifies that by showing Ford’s arrogance and implying that the Ferrari side has a purer love for the sport. As such the film treats them as a kind of hill to climb without attributing any malice to them. Indeed the film even shows the Ford team skirting the rules of race and Shelby pulling off some juvenile pranks in order to win while the Italians seem more honorable. Instead the primary antagonist here is Ford’s own bureaucratic culture as exemplified in the form of the vice-president Beebe. As a much larger company, Ford is able to call on near infinite resources yet at the same time their ability to do things quickly is hampered by the need to get approvals at every stage and having to struggle against the internally established proper way of doing things. This would actually make for a pretty good film about management if that angle were more fully developed.

From what I understand this film even understates the extent to which pure money determines the winner. Ford and Ferrari were the only possible contenders because they had the money to simply flood the field with cars. It seems that Ford alone entered 15 cars into Le Mans, ensuring that at least some of the cars would make it through the whole 24 hours if some are lost due to accidents or technical issues. I also have a hard imagining how fans can find 24 hours of sitting through cars endlessly going in a circle to be an exciting spectacle. Nonetheless this is clearly a sport that has plenty of fans and this is fine film that captures some sense of what happened in that eventful year.