A lot of pressure has been put on this movie by IndyCar fans to be the tool to introduce IndyCar to young children and return the fan base to it's grand size during the 1990s. I am pretty sure it won't do that. It's only a movie. I doubt a child of age six or seven is going to watch this movie and go home can't waiting to see Mid-Ohio in two weeks. They will be more interested in the talking snail who will not be racing at Mid-Ohio, Sonoma, Fontana, Iowa or Indianapolis because he's not real. I hate to sound pessimistic but this movie is not going bring an additional 60,000 people to Fontana for the season finale. This movie will not double the Indy Lights grid and give them a TV package showing all the races live. Those are things IndyCar has to work on. Better marketing, better sponsor activation, drawing more eyeballs to the races on television, Turbo won't magically make all those things happen. That's IndyCar's job. But, Turbo is a great way to show a child IndyCar, something they may have never seen before.
From all I have heard, the movie sounds like it respects the track, the race, it's history and the drivers who compete. DreamWorks wanted to make a movie as realistic as possible and hired Dario Franchitti as a consultant, not a bad choice. This movie won't be Grand Prix, where we see James Garner and Yves Montand getting in their cars for the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch right next to Jimmy Clark and Dan Gurney and I doubt Turbo features a driver's meeting where the main character is in a room with Ryan Hunter-Reay, James Hinchcliffe, Helio Castroneves and the rest of the starting field for the Indianapolis 500.
Turbo is going to be it's own racing movie. I am not sure but I have a feeling there will be no fatal or near-fatal accidents like Grand Prix and Le Mans, no IndyCars driving through the streets of Chicago at 200 mph (thank God) and no romantic story lines of a driver being separated from their wife who is with another driver. More importantly, I hope Turbo doesn't feature race control, fans complaining about race control or standing starts or green-white-checkered finishes or double-file restarts, debates over whether the series has too few ovals or too many street courses, Lotus (it already features snails. All you got to do is throw a badge on them and Lotus is in the movie) or the negativity that has followed IndyCar for the better part of nearly the last twenty years.
Turbo is another fresh page for IndyCar, let's hope all the pages after this are just as fresh.
