This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Director Ron Howard's dramatisation of the dangerously intense rivalry between Formula 1 legends James Hunt and Niki Lauda,
Rush, recreates their 70s races in flawless detail -- and then supercharges them digitally. "Ron had the idea of getting the original cars," says Jody Johnson, the film's visual-effects supervisor. "We went to museums and private owners and photographed and scanned them, so we had models and textures. We then got the owners to bring the cars to the Lotus test track in Hethel in Norfolk, and we did some high-speed filming to see how the cars behaved."
There were certain requirements the real cars could not meet, though: fly through the air, crash, catch fire and so on. To recreate the physics of the cars, the crew borrowed an original F1 simulator. "The original simulators were kind of sophisticated games units," says Johnson. "They built a framework to take the seat, pedal box and steering wheel, and used open-source R-type software that simulates how the cars behave, gives you the tracks and the other cars. We had this simple little simulator we could test in, then we input our own physical attributes so that it would behave like Formula 1 cars of the day. We did some inertial measurement unit testing, fixing a sophisticated GPS and gyroscope system to one of the cars, and measured how fast it was going, how it was cornering.
Most of the tracks we were shooting at were available online, so we downloaded them, and built a game around this R-type framework that had our cars and our tracks in it."
Rush is released on 20 September.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
