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Went to see "Rush," the Ron Howard film about the duel between World Driving Champions Niki Lauda and James Hunt during the 1976 racing season Sunday. Oh, man, we both really liked it, especially since it was showing at the local iPic, the most wonderful theater on the planet (Oh, waiter, please bring us each a bloody bloody Mary, chop-chop!). When it ended, I wiped my eyes dry, turned to Laura and said, "Wow!" And she said, "do you think they'd let us sit through it again?" Atta girl! My sweetie is such a killer.

Loved seeing the cars, the real items, in action, and hearing them. They got most of the details spot-on, from what I could tell, and I was pleased that they covered the first F1 year with the Hesketh team, and even showed the car, as well as got Harvey Postlethwaite's name, and those of Lord Hesketh and Bubbles Horseley, team owner and team manager, into the story. Fabulous characters from one of the most entertaining teams ever to grace F1. Yes, and I thought the racing scenes were done beautifully.

Oh, the crash scene at the Glen. The scene flashed by very quickly - the decapitated remains still in the car. That was poor Francois Cevert after going under the don't-call-it-Armco, the crash that pushed the great John Young Stewart (if he couldn't score seat 1A, British Air, he didn't fly) to retire. Awful times.

But worse than that, the Lauda crash scene at the Nurburgring took my breath away - it was one of the most awful, frightening things I've ever seen.

This was the era when I was at Autoweek, covering F1 myself when the circus came to Long Beach, so I was really a super fan as well as an observer. I remember reading somewhere that the damage to Lauda's lungs came not so much from burns, but from inhaling the fumes of the burning plastic from the car's seat; and also that the reason he pulled off in Japan was not so much because the risk was too great, as the movie indicates, but because the fire had damaged his eyelids to the point where he was unable to blink away the water that was leaking into his helmet, so couldn't see. Apocryphal or true? I don't suppose we'll ever know. More important, I didn't really realize that Lauda was such a complete dick. "Just a German," is what Laura said. Though that does come through, I think, when you read and listen to his interviews, now that he's a honcho with Mercedes, crabby, elderly and paunchy like so many of us, wearing his plaid shirt and red cap. A three-time World Champion, bless his surly heart, so he's excused.

My pal Paul Aragon, who doesn't miss bloody much, noticed that the starts showed the five-light system, which wasn't in use then, and that at Monte Carlo, they raced around the piscine, or swimming pool, which hadn't been built in that era.

But I don't care. You use what you have and/or can find. I liked "Rush" a lot. So did Laura, who thought that the women in the film were beautiful. Uh, er, so did I. I also thought the footage of the real guys at the end of the film, and especially Lauda's comments, was incredibly poignant. Poor Hunt, of course, dead at 45 after livin' and dyin' the life, is not available for comment. Poor talented bastard. As Aragon noted, "Too bad James Hunt isn't alive today to impart one of his usually caustic statements on the movie."

Indeed.

All in all, I thought "Rush" was brilliant. I'll need to see it again. And then acquire the DVD. Oh, excuse me - you youthful lot call it the Blu-ray these days, right? Hey, I'm mired in the good old days. And I don't care one little bit. For that's when heroes drove real racing cars.

-JFT