Over the weekend we sat down to give Time Warner Cable one last chance before we cut the cord. Luckily, we stumbled on some great Planet Green and HD Theater stuff, like Discovery’s (parent of HD Theater) Why We Race, an inside look at the Mustang Challenge racing series.
The show’s branded to hell by Ford, but for a guy who loves cars, the show is pay dirt and somehow we didn’t mind at all that it focused purely on Ford. After all, the Mustang Challenge is an actual racing series, so why not tape it?
Stemming from the Rausch days when muscle cars were everywhere, the series pits amateur and semi-pro drivers against one another in stock Mustangs (with some basic up-mods to give the cars some extra oomph). The drivers all buy in, at $75k per car, and travel across the country for eight different races.
We can’t say for sure that Ford pays for the show, but they should definitely be talking it up. One team is comprised of four guys from StableOne, who are shitty at driving, have too much money and don’t deserve to be there. Juxtapose that against 19 year-old Andrew Cadell, whose parents drop every last penny of their extra income into their son’s racing career. The kid walked on to the racetrack that first day and kicked all the rich assholes right off the pavement.
WWR is half-documentary, half history lesson. Some may not like it, but if we were Ford’s marketing team we’d be spreading it all over the place. It’s fun to watch a young Cadell whip the old rich guys (he took gold in the first two races) and even better to watch the bad drivers crash head-on into oncoming walls.
More than anything though, WWR is natural branding for the Mustang. The racing series allows regular (though rich) guys to race their mostly-stock Mustangs — something most of us would relish the opportunity to do. Most importantly, we’ll be watching next weekend to see how race three rounds out.