Director Ron Howard makes his racing film believable

Ron Howard admits he was no racing aficionado when he set out to make the Formula One thriller “Rush,” chronicling the tense 1976 world championship battle between playboy James Hunt and calculating Niki Lauda.

Racing movies don’t have the best track record, after all. The driving has usually been unrealistic and too many directors cheated on details that insiders found offensive.

“I love sports, too, and I don’t know much about Formula One, but I just kept thinking, ‘If somebody made a baseball movie and if they cut to the center fielder and the center fielder was standing there with a catcher’s glove on, I’d feel disrespected,”’ Howard said in a recent phone interview with The Associated Press. “I didn’t want those kinds of gaffes. When talking to people who really love motorsports, they’d talk about movies that weren’t documentaries and they’d cite mistakes, the kind of mistakes that would really just take them out of the movie.

“While you can never be 1,000 percent authentic, it was important that we get it right.”

Howard was understandably nervous when he screened “Rush” for the F1 community, with Lauda himself in the audience, during the German Grand Prix weekend in July.

“It was tense for me, and I think they were gracious but skeptical going into the screening,” Howard said. “When it was over, I think they were surprised at how much care had been given. People who had lived through it were palpably moved.”

Howard’s understating the response he received: Lauda led the room in a standing ovation and the overwhelming reaction so far has been that Howard has made one of the most realistic and true racing movies to date.

“Everybody says that the racing scenes are really incredibly filmed and done. So you have to ask normal people, not us. Normal people, they really liked the whole thing,” Lauda told AP. “I can only judge the way the public is judging. The public seems to like it, in America, here, everywhere.”

Lauda has praised the Peter Morgan script, Howard’s directing and Daniel Bruhl, who plays Lauda in the film. Although Lauda did not spend many days on set, Howard said the former racer was available in preproduction and gracious with his time. Bruhl had the Austrian on speed dial during filming.

“When something came up with the language or expressions, or a question in sequence like did Niki put his gloves on first or his helmet on first, Daniel would just take a moment and go over and be on the phone, and I’d know he’d be on the phone with Niki,” Howard recalled.

It’s a complicated story featuring two very different heroes. Hunt, the hard-partying, womanizing Englishman who succeeds despite himself, and the cold and socially inept Lauda, who has no time or patience for anything but winning.