“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” turns 20 next year, which means there are kids in college who weren’t even alive when it came out. In fact, come 2026, “Talladega Nights” will be as old as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was when “Talladega Nights” first hit theaters. According to Will Ferrell, “We were real adamant up front that our goal wasn’t to make fun of NASCAR. We wanted to have fun with NASCAR.” Ask Kyle Larson, though, and he doesn’t exactly see it that way. According to Larson, the movie turned NASCAR into a joke.
That assertion comes from a recent episode of Julian Edelman’s Games With Names podcast, which is embedded below. A little more than 44 minutes into the episode, Larson was asked about “Talladega Nights” and said, “I like the movie. I think it did not do anything good for our sport. I think it turned our sport into like a joke, unfortunately. But it is, I mean, that’s got to be one of the most popular racing movies.” He then added, “I feel like the rest of the world, that’s what they think about our sport now.”
He said it jokingly, so I can’t imagine he’s too upset about it, but at the same time, come on, man. People were already making NASCAR jokes long before 2006. Maybe he was too busy racing and hanging out with other racers to hear them, but even in the rural Georgia county I grew up in (which has since filled up with a bunch of rich jerks), jokes about NASCAR were pretty darn common. As for the rest of the world, I’m pretty sure they didn’t need any help making fun of NASCAR, either.
Days of Thunder, though…
Ironically, as you can see in the video above, they got onto the subject of “Talladega Nights” when Edelman asked which movie was the best race movie of all time. Larson’s answer was “Days of Thunder,” the 1990 Tom Cruise film that’s both finally getting a sequel and was also hated by NASCAR at the time. When the movie was released 35 years ago, Dale Earnhardt told Entertainment Weekly, “The words out of Tom Cruise’s mouth to me were that this was going to be real, as real as racing is today. I just don’t think they made it that way.”
Earnhardt wasn’t the only NASCAR driver who didn’t like “Days of Thunder,” either. In that same article, Alan Kulwicki said, “I don’t think they did us justice. They portrayed us like we’re running bumper cars.” Apparently, the drivers and pit-crew members hated the movie so much, “top NASCAR officials, in closed-door meetings…urged them to keep their Thunder grumblings to themselves,” presumably in an attempt to avoid tanking the movie they’d been such a big part of helping make.
Of course, Larson, who was born in 1992, wouldn’t remember all of that, as he hadn’t been born yet. He was also probably still pretty young the first time he saw “Days of Thunder” and just thought it was an awesome movie. On the other hand, he was in high school when “Talladega Nights” came out, so it makes sense that he’d be much more critical of the way it portrayed NASCAR.
On top of that, “Talladega Nights” is a comedy and therefore quotable in a way that “Days of Thunder” really isn’t. That would probably have been fine on its own, but NASCAR fans also lean heavily conservative, and if there’s one thing conservative comedy relies heavily on, it’s repetition. There’s even an entire subreddit dedicated to it. If you think you’ve heard too many “Talladega Nights” references at this point, imagine being a NASCAR driver listening to fan after fan repeat the same lines they’ve heard ten million times before. You’d probably start to resent the movie, too.
