The Racers that Stopped the World is a new documentary from the team at Outrun Films. It includes a slew of interviews with some of the most important motoring and motor racing characters in history including Sir Stirling Moss, Sir Jackie Stewart, Norman Dewis, Derek Bell, Martin Brundle, Murray Walker, and Andrew Frankel.
The film was created to tell the story of the humble disc brake, a relatively simple mechanical braking solution that Jaguar put to good use in the 1950s – helping to popularize it and doubtless saving innumerable lives over the intervening decades as the technology became commonplace in road cars.
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Official Film Description
The extraordinary story of Stirling Moss and Norman Dewis. How many lives do you think the disc brake has saved since its introduction to the car in 1952? Arguably more than the seat belt itself, or even Penicillin.
Join Sir Stirling Moss, Norman Dewis and an extraordinary lineup of motorsport legends including Murray Walker, Sir Jackie Stewart, Martin Brundle, Derek Bell, and Andrew Frankel as they drive us down memory lane telling an incredible story that really stopped the world with unseen footage and interviews.
Stirling – already on his way to becoming one of the greatest racing drivers of all time – took a new brake concept that Norman Dewis, legendary Jaguar test driver and engineer, had been working on alongside Jaguar and Dunlops engineering team to revolutionise the braking ability of cars – which at the time were falling behind dramatically compared to how fast cars of the ’50s were starting to go.
This documentary was filmed 8 years ago but never released. When Sir Stirling sadly passed away at Easter 2020, I took the original footage I’d shot and started again to produce this film, and with the significant aid of friends, this brand new reworking of the project is released so that the story can be told once and for all.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
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.
