Day of The Champion film footage: The fluke find
British archivist Richard Wiseman remembers the moment he discovered the film footage and how an unlikely ally introduced him to the Sky programme commissioner
Steve McQueen: The Lost Movie is written, produced and directed by Alex Rodger, who got his teeth into this feature-length project after time spent producing short pre-race features for Sky F1’s modern grand prix coverage. But this fine documentary wouldn’t exist without archivist Richard Wiseman’s amazing discovery. How he uncovered the 1965 German Grand Prix rushes that are at the heart of the story about Day of The Champion is perhaps a case in favour of the theory that fate is a thing.
Wiseman (left) is among Britain’s finest archivists, with a long list of credits behind him from the gems he’s discovered, including a previous Steve McQueen documentary, The Man & Le Mans. “When we made that in 2015 there was a plan for a chapter on Day of The Champion,” he says. “Unfortunately, the archivist couldn’t find where the film was… But during Covid lockdown, it was a classic case: I found it while I was looking for something else. I was working on a Max Mosley documentary” – set to be released sometime during 2021, with the full co-operation of the ex-FIA president – “and I had been sent from America some ‘wallpaper’ footage of the Nürburgring from a stock library to see if it was suitable for the film. As you know, Max was a racing driver in the late 1960s and had mentioned he’d driven at the ’Ring. But when I saw these film files I thought, ‘I know what this is!’ So I asked for all the files from that run and it all emerged.”
Authenticity was everything to McQueen, as this list of cars reveals