Thursday 21st August 2014

Tom Cruise races a 300ZX: Time For Tea?

Not for a film, not for TV, Tom Cruise was an actual racing driver in the 80s. It's eventful!

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Amazing the stuff you can find on the internet sometimes. Here we have one of a few videos recently published documenting Tom Cruise's motorsport career. Really.

Turns out the post-Top Gun Cruise was keen to emulate Paul Newman and make a racing career from an acting one. Newman in fact ran a Nissan 300ZX in Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) events and here we see a young Mr Cruise as one of the drivers.

He looks good too, albeit perhaps a little too brave for his own good when he spins the Nissan. An old Jalopnik interview with an SCCA champion states Cruise's attitude was "go fast all the time" and that he "was very aggressive" in the car. So Tom didn't make a career of racing like his hero Paul but it does explain some of his later gung-ho driving. Days of Thunder remains bemusing though.

Watch the video here.

 

 

[Source: Jalopnik]

[mrclav]

It's funny, I was watching Mission Impossible II last night and all I could think was after seeing both this clip and the movie is "Damn, he's aged well"...