Adam Cheek

3 weeks ago | frontstretch.com | Adam Cheek

If you look up “aura” in the dictionary, you’ll probably find the featured photo for this article — Kyle Busch on top of a movie-themed race car amid a cloud of burnout smoke at Darlington Raceway. The 2008 season brought us a weird blend of movies on NASCAR bodies. Four more or less blockbusters — oddly, two of them starring Brendan Fraser — alongside a dumb comedy and a bad horror movie. Not all of the movies were winners, but one of the cars did make it to victory lane.

1 month ago | frontstretch.com | Adam Cheek

After a week’s break to chat with the director of the Earnhardt docuseries, we return to our regularly-scheduled programming of NASCAR paint schemes. The year 2007 had nine schemes representing eight movies across eight different drivers, with some overlap here and there. No wins this time around, though.

1 month ago | frontstretch.com | Adam Cheek

If you head on over to Amazon Prime on Thursday (May 22) at some point or another you’ll see the mustachioed face of Dale Earnhardt gracing your screen. Ahead of the first NASCAR Cup race broadcast on the streaming service — the Coca-Cola 600 this Sunday (May 25) — Prime has debuted Earnhardt, a four-part docu-series tracing the life, career and legacy of the ‘Man in Black.’I was given a chance to see screeners of episodes and also chat with Joshua Altman, the director of the series.

1 month ago | frontstretch.com | Adam Cheek

We’ve arrived at 2006: the year of the NASCAR-themed movies. Both Cars and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby hit theaters across the spring and summer of ’06, bringing NASCAR to the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist — one geared at kids filing into theaters with their parents, one at teens and adults who wanted to see Will Ferrell do some stock car racing. Cars begat two sequels, while Talladega Nights was the beginning of the Will Ferrell – John C.

1 month ago | frontstretch.com | Adam Cheek

It only feels right that a week after a couple friends and I headed to an anniversary re-release showing of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, I write about the year that the movie had four schemes on NASCAR Cup cars across three races and four drivers in 2005. That year had fewer films represented than the two preceding turns of the calendar, but four of the six movies had at least two schemes each — and many of them in different events, as opposed to all in the same race.