THE WIN THAT SAVED HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS

The Win That Saved Hendrick Motorsports

This film recreates one of the most pivotal moments in NASCAR history: Geoff Bodine's underdog victory at Martinsville in the spring of 1984, the first win for a nearly bankrupt Rick Hendrick and the race that kept him from closing the doors on his team for good. Produced for Fox Sports and premiered during the 2023 Martinsville NASCAR broadcast on FOX, the film had to rebuild an era that no longer exists, on a budget that left no margin for error. As a lifelong NASCAR fan, I had heard this story told and retold long before it ever reached me, which made the chance to bring it to the screen one I leapt at.

The piece was shot on vintage Panavision B-series anamorphics paired with an ARRI ALEXA Mini. The B-series is older, revived Panavision glass, prized for its soft, pastel rendering, gentle flares, and the way it wraps around a subject, all of which read instantly as an earlier era of film. With the 1984 version of Martinsville Speedway long gone, the track was conjured from an empty Los Angeles parking lot dressed with practical elements: stacks of tires, pit road gear, Jersey barriers, fencing, and period cars. Everything past the foreground was left bare, and VFX later filled the deep background with grandstands and crowd, soft and far out of focus, an illusion the anamorphic falloff sold beautifully.

Matching the look meant matching the weather. The reference was real archival footage of the actual race, badly degraded and shot under a flat, overcast Virginia spring sky, so to turn a hot, cloudless LA day into April gloom, we flew a 20-by-40 overhead from a Condor and pushed diffusion into the air above the lot until the light read like the archive. When the director tested positive for COVID on the first day, I helped keep the production on course alongside the producer, working with him to guide the performances while a deep crew and a dedicated camera operator kept me free to focus on the photography. The result is a film that lives convincingly in 1984, built almost entirely in-camera in the days before AI tools could do the work for you. Recreating a real moment from the sport's history out of a bare lot and a fan's imagination is exactly the kind of challenge I love, and it remains one of my favorite projects I have shot.