NASCAR: Full Speed looks a little different this year.
As opposed to its first two installments, which were miniseries based on the 2023 and 2024 seasons, the 2026 campaign appears to just be a single episode: an 86-minute documentary based around the Daytona 500.
The series moved to Prime from Netflix, and Full Speed: The Daytona 500 was the first thing released after the switch.
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It was released on March 5, which is such a quick turnaround — a good chunk of it focuses on preseason prep, so they had plenty of time to edit it, but it still came out less than three weeks after Tyler Reddick rolled under the checkered in first place to win his first Great American Race.
I liked the focus on certain drivers, which gives the documentary some direction, as opposed to trying to spotlight the entire field.
We get Kyle Busch and Brad Keselowski, both of whom are hovering around two decades of trying to win the Great American Race and coming up short; Keselowski had the additional burden of injuring his leg a couple months prior to the race.
It also spotlights Connor Zilisch, who was 19 when he started the 2026 Daytona 500, and Noah Gragson, who offers a perspective in between the two — a guy who’s been around the sport for a few years and essentially holds veteran status (but who’s also never won the race).
The auxiliary interviews — with people like Zilisch’s crew or Busch’s and Keselowski’s families — add a lot too. And the everyday stuff, like when Zilisch goes to Target and has to balance being an inexperienced shopper and running into fans, is pretty cool. He’s a gem throughout though, both funny on the shopping side and really gracious with the fans.
It also has my favorite line in the entire doc, from Zilisch, which I absolutely cackled at:
“I’m treated like royalty. Little do they know I’m a loser.”
I kind of look at this documentary as a really good introduction to the sport for either new fans or non-fans who might be interested to know more — the drivers, their approaches to racing, their lives outside the racetrack, the preparation for the race (any race, honestly) and the overall prestige of the Daytona 500.
A lot of people might not know that the Great American Race draws more than 100,000 fans. Some might not know how much of a chess match running three-wide at 190 miles per hour is for several hours on end at Daytona.
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This documentary serves as a pretty solid encapsulation of all those things in less than an hour and a half’s worth of runtime.
And I will always be a big supporter of uncensored interviews and documentaries like this, especially when everything is usually bleeped in radio transmissions or Radioactive replays.
If you’re wondering where this ranks in the grand lexicon of racing movies or NASCAR documentaries, I’m not sure yet. Coming at it as someone familiar with almost everything (as opposed to something like the Nürburgring documentary The Green Hell or the IndyCar AMR Safety Team doc Rapid Response, where I knew less going in), it’s kind of hard to rank it. But it’s very well put together and well produced. Solid end product.
More of this stuff, please.
Stop implying that running three wide for lap after lap after lap after… while the lead cars hold up each line slower than they are capable of going is an entertaining example of Brian’s product. I’d like to count the grey hairs on the drivers before and after the event while they are having “fun”.