On its own, La Carrera Panamericana is a super documentary about the 1991 running of the resurrected Mexican Road Race. What’s truly interesting about it, though, is that it was presented by Pink Floyd, and produced by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason, who competed in the event that year. The one-hour doc — which we’ve included in two parts below — features a soundtrack of a mix of new and old music from the band.
Even if you’re not a Pink Floyd fan, it’s an amazingly cool documentary, with interviews from some pretty stellar competitors, including Alain De Cadenet, Valentine Lindsay — Mason’s navigator, and great footage of some awesome cars including AK Miller’s El Caballo.
Mason and Gilmour ran the race in a pair of white C-Type Jaguars beefed up to somewhat modern standards with a roll cage and better brakes. They race over six days, from sea-level to about 10,000 feet in elevation.
There’s a lot of Pink Floyd material on the soundtrack which you’ll recognize, but there are six songs recorded specifically for the documentary, between the two Pink Floyd albums A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell. The tracks composed for the video are the first studio recordings made after Richard Wright re-joined the band in 1988. The new studio recordings were produced by Gilmour. The songs “Pan Am Shuffle” and “Carrera Slow Blues” are notable as the first tracks co-written by Wright since 1975’s Wish You Were Here, as well as the first co-written by Mason since 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon.
This is that period of time when Roger Waters had left, and he and the remaining members were embroiled in a legal battle over who got to use the name “Pink Floyd,” so it’s interesting to see the “Pink Floyd Presents” title at the start of the documentary, rather than it just being a Gilmour/Mason effort.
A soundtrack album was not released, but the tracks are available on the A Tree Full of Secrets bootleg recording.
The Carrera might be modernized to a certain extent, but it’s still a dangerous event, which Gilmour and Pink Floyd’s manager, Steve O’Rourke found out. Coming into a corner with too much speed, Gilmour crashed the Jaguar he was driving. He was uninjured, but O’Rourke — his navigator — suffered a broken leg.
Here’s the full documentary. It’s definitely worth an hour of your time:
Part I
Part II
