The Days of Thunder Sequel rumors just don’t stop.
Over the past two years, the movie has seemingly teased itself every couple of months with lead actor Tom Cruise and NASCAR executives all taking time to offer optimism that the movie is still in some form of pre-production.
NASCAR Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon, who is now an executive with Hendrick Motorsports, is a long-time friend of Cruise and also expressed optimism for the project after winning the Daytona 500 on Sunday with driver William Byron for the second year in a row.
“I mean, I am seeing just a lot more momentum in projects like coming through NASCAR and coming to Hendrick Motorsports and just more interest,” Gordon said. “So that’s good, right? It talks a lot about where the sport is at, where it’s heading, the amazing crowd that was here all weekend, not just today, new TV partners.
“So I do think that there’s this kind of resurgence, which is awesome, and there’s also a whole new landscape of opportunities with streaming services and docuseries and also the big screen, which I think it would be amazing to do.”
To his point, there is an upswing in casual NASCAR popularity right now and the Sanctioning Body is working hard to cultivate and capitalize. NASCAR has beefed up its production capabilities and there are a lot of projects in the works in terms of documentaries and fiction.
Hendrick Motorsports was also part of the original Days of Thunder in supplying cars to the production. And to Gordon’s point, scenes were actually filmed during actual races with show cars added to the field.
“Hendrick Motorsports being a part of that project, hard to imagine how you pull that off today because they actually had race cars with cameras in the race, and the cameras were big,” Gordon said. “Cameras have gotten a lot smaller so maybe you could pull it off, but how do you do it and make it realistic and really authentic.
“But I’ve absolutely talked to Tom about it because I want him to do the project, and we want to be a part of it if it were to happen.
“He seems to like to tease it, so I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. If that doesn’t happen, I feel pretty confident there’s a project out there that will get NASCAR back on the big screen, if not just a really cool docuseries or something beyond even what we’re already seeing right now.”
