Circuit is a documentary about the 1981 Can-Am season. The film is a masterpiece of motorsport filmmaking, with excellent onboard footage, aerial footage, and beautifully filmed racing sequences.
The film features appearances by the likes of Paul Newman, Stirling Moss, Geoff Brabham, Bobby Rahal, Lynn Hallowell, Teo Fabi, Al Unser, and many others. One particularly memorable part features Paul Newman personally testing his own Can-Am prototype race car at Laguna Seca – he was an accomplished racing driver himself and often joked that he only acted in films to finance his passion for motorsport.
The soundtrack is the pure distilled sound of the 1980s, the car liveries have long since become iconic, and the film offers an excellent window into one of the toughest and fastest forms of motor racing in the world at that time. There were always a lot of Formula 1 and other top flight drivers in Can-Am including Indianapolis 500 winners like Bobby Rahal, Al Unser, and future 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Geoff Brabham.
The documentary runs at a feature film length of 1.5 hours, I won’t go into any further detail here so as not to ruin the film, it does come highly recommended and it’s great to see Paul Newman Racing in their March-Chevrolets battling it out with the likes of Lola, VDS, Frissbee, and Holbert.
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Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.