Formula One cars have always represented the pinnacle of automotive engineering during their many respective iterations over the years. This film was made by the Shell Oil Company in 1955 as a promotion movie at the Belgian Grand Prix. This race was held on the 9-mile long public road course known as Spa. The narrator takes us for a tour of the track and explains all of the various twists and turns along the way. From a 30mph hairpin to long straights, Spa was one of the most challenging and fastest courses in the world during the middle 1950s. The film features some of the most well known race car drivers in history. Fangio, Moss, Mike Hawthorne, and a host of others in entries from Mercedes, Maserati, Lancia, and others. These guys were hitting speeds of 180mph on the long straights in these cars that didn’t have so much as a seatbelt and the most protective piece of clothing a driver wore was a wool sweater.

What we most enjoyed about this video was watching the hay bales get set up to mark a corner, the fans sitting in the grass next to the track slugging wine, a dog running on the course and causing a momentary panic, and a lot of other moments that just seem like they happened on a foreign planet when compared to how Formula One is run today and what it has become. Then there is the sound. Oh the sounds coming from these cars are freaking unreal. As an indication of how far ahead 1955 Formula One cars were (like their modern variants) the machine that Fangio is racing at Spa is a Mercedes powered by a 2.5L naturally aspirated straight eight engine. It makes somewhere around 300hp, has a desmodromic valvetrain, fuel injection, and the ability to turn nearly 8,000 RPM. Again, this is in 1955.

While parts of the film are a little on the dry side, the racing footage is top shelf, especially when the camera catch the cars coming from the pits and you hear them wind up going down the straight and also when the cameras get the cars coming by at full tilt and maximum RPM. It is not the air tool wail of today’s cars because there is actually a little base to the sound. It is symphonic.

You may not be a vintage Formula One fan, but as a gearhead you owe it to yourself to check this movie out for a little while. It pretty much rules.

PRESS PLAY BELOW TO LIVE A HISTORY LESSON FROM THE 1955 BELGIAN GP FROM THE SHELL OIL ARCHIVES