Racing sequences for Days of Thunder being filmed at Phoenix International Raceway in 1989. Photo: us44mt via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
NASCAR is building more than 80 cars for Days of Thunder 2. That figure comes from one sentence in the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Brief newsletter, published Oct. 12, and the sentence is written in the reporter’s voice. NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell is not quoted giving the number.
The item, by Erle Norton of the WSJ Leadership Institute, came out of O’Donnell’s visit to the institute’s offices. Most of it covers Project 2032, NASCAR’s growth plan, which the newsletter describes as an effort to line up teams, tracks, TV partners, manufacturers and sponsors behind one strategy. The movie gets two sentences. In the first, O’Donnell relays a warning from Tom Cruise: NASCAR “better be ready for this,” because people who have never watched a race are going to tune in. The second says the organization is building the cars and that the film “will shoot at Nascar tracks.”
So the most specific production detail released for the sequel so far reached the public secondhand, through a business newsletter, attached to nobody.
What the sentence leaves out
It doesn’t say what “building” means. NASCAR sanctions the Cup Series; it doesn’t field cars. Next Gen chassis, in use since 2022, come from one vendor, Technique Chassis of Concord, North Carolina, which NASCAR named as the supplier in 2021. The newsletter doesn’t say whether the movie cars are Next Gen cars, Technique chassis, older cars wearing current bodies, or shells built to be wrecked and parked in the background.
It also doesn’t say how many will run under their own power, which manufacturers’ bodies they will carry, who is paying for them, whether teams are involved, or whether any of them will turn a lap during a live race weekend. “Will shoot at Nascar tracks” covers everything from a rented Tuesday at Charlotte to cars on track with the Cup field.
For scale, NASCAR’s entry list for the Aug. 29 regular-season finale at Daytona had 41 cars chasing 40 starting spots, 36 of them chartered. Eighty cars is two of those fields. Those charters have become nine-figure assets, and the teams holding them buy and prepare their own cars.
How the first film did it
The 1990 film put its cars in points races. Racing-Reference’s results for the 1989 Autoworks 500 at Phoenix list Bobby Hamilton in the No. 51 Exxon Chevrolet, owned by Rick Hendrick: the Rowdy Burns car from the movie. Hamilton started fifth, led five laps and was classified 32nd when the engine failed after 215 laps. A points-paying Cup race had a prop car in the top five on the grid.
Those were Hendrick cars, prepared in a Hendrick shop, in an era when a team could bolt a camera to a carbureted Lumina and enter it. The car Cole Trickle is coming back to is built largely from single-source parts under a much tighter rulebook. The newsletter doesn’t explain why the sanctioning body, rather than a team, is the one doing the building this time.
Where the sequel stands
Cruise announced the film on Aug. 29 with a post reading “Days of Thunder. Summer 2028,” and Variety reported the same day that Paramount had set a June 2, 2028 release, with Anne Hathaway cast as a team owner and engineer. The Hollywood Reporter reported in July that Jonathan Levine was in talks to direct from a Will Staples script, with filming expected to start in early 2027. Cruise made his case to the garage in person at Daytona, as we covered in September.
O’Donnell has been CEO since April 25, when NASCAR announced him at Talladega as the first chief executive from outside the France family. The newsletter calls the movie one of his biggest opportunities. We found no statement from NASCAR or Paramount on the car program itself.
If filming starts in early 2027 as reported, those 80-plus cars have to exist within months, and NASCAR’s 2027 schedule will show which tracks have open dates around a film crew. Should NASCAR let movie cars start a points-paying race again, the way Hendrick’s No. 51 did at Phoenix in 1989, or keep the cameras off a live field?
Sources: The Wall Street Journal CEO Brief, “Nascar’s New CEO Aims to Take ‘Big Swings'” (Oct. 12, 2026); NASCAR leadership announcement (April 25, 2026); NASCAR Cup Series Daytona entry list (Aug. 24, 2026); NASCAR Next Gen chassis memo coverage (July 19, 2021); Racing-Reference results, 1989 Autoworks 500; Tom Cruise social post (Aug. 29, 2026).
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