Super speedway / production notes
Getting Started. The development of Super Speedway got under way in 1993. Stephen Low, a longtime enthusiast of open-wheel racing, had harboured the dream of producing a film about auto racing since his father, acclaimed filmmaker Colin Low, filmed Jimmy Clark winning the Indy 500 in 1965.
From start to finish, the Super Speedway project took just over four years. By the time the pieces of the production puzzle fell into place, the producers of the film had succeeded in getting Newman/Haas Racing, a top racing team, to field and maintain an actual Indy car equipped with an IMAX camera; convinced legendary driver Mario Andretti to pilot the camera car; landed Mario and his son, racing star Michael Andretti, as subjects of the film; and secured IMAX coverage of the teams and drivers of the PPG CART World Series on the track and in racing action. To top it all off, the production team had miraculously stumbled across the work of expert car restorer Don Lyons. Lyons was in the process of restoring the wreckage of a classic 1964 roadster — a unique, hand-built machine (the last of its kind ever made) that was driven in 1964 by a rookie driver named Mario Andretti.
Super Speedway was filmed from an Indy car driven by Mario Andretti under real race conditions and at race speeds—the first giant screen film to feature extensive high-speed track action. The Lola camera car was originally driven to victory by Nigel Mansel in the 1994 season.
For Real. Stephen Low and Mario Andretti were only interested in shooting a film that conveyed the reality of driving a race car at speeds up to 240 miles per hour. On the track, Andretti proved to be an exceptional camera operator with a natural feel for shooting, an instinctive finesse that contributed strongly to the power of the final movie experience. “Stephen explained that even with that big lump of a camera on the car, he expected me to drive as hard as I could,” says Andretti. “And I thought, now you're talking my language. I didn't want to just cruise around and be a donkey out there. They were looking for somebody who really wanted to put some teeth into the deal. I said to him, ‘Well, okay, let's not use any trickery in the filming, no speeding up the camera. Let's just be realistic. If we can represent reality, then I'll do it.’ And we never looked back.”
