Days of Thunder 2: How NASCAR Has Changed Since 1990

Editor's note: This article was updated on February 16, 2025.

Days of Thunder 2 now has a firm date: June 2, 2028, with Paramount releasing. Tom Cruise will reprise Cole Trickle, and Anne Hathaway joins the cast as a team owner and engineer. Jonathan Levine is directing Will Staples's script, while Cruise, Jerry Bruckheimer and Tommy Harper produce. The actor confirmed the project himself in an on-site teaser filmed at Daytona International Speedway during Coke Zero Sugar 400 weekend, and the movie is being shot for IMAX.

What the teaser did not show is how much the sport has changed since the original landed on June 27, 1990. From the mechanics of the car to the math of the business model, almost nothing about NASCAR Cup racing looks or works the way it did when Cole Trickle first climbed into the Mello Yello Lumina.

The old car was built to be rebuilt

The Lumina that Trickle drove was old-school by design. It had a steel tube frame, a carbureted V-8 and a four-speed manual gearbox with an H-pattern shifter. The rear axle was solid, and each 15-inch steel wheel was held in place by five lug nuts. Any experienced crew chief from that period could tear one down overnight and put it back together by morning — and they often had to.

Several screen-used Luminas are still out there. One has spent years on display at the Hollywood Star Cars Museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Others were not so lucky: a batch of the original cars ended up abandoned in the woods before collectors and teams salvaged them. The contrast between those two fates fits the story of the sport itself.

The Next Gen era is built for parity

The current Cup Series car, introduced in 2022, shares almost nothing with Trickle's machine. The 358-cubic-inch pushrod V-8 remains a familiar piece, but electronic fuel injection has handled the fuel mixture since 2012. The transmission is a five-speed sequential unit that the driver pushes and pulls, not rowing through an H gate. The wheels are 18-inch aluminum BBS hoops, each fastened with a single center-locking nut. The rear suspension is independent, the body is composite rather than hand-bent sheet metal, and many components come from a small group of approved suppliers.

The center-lock wheel is the symbol of this generation. During pit stops, a single heavy gun is enough; there is no longer a dance of five air hammers per corner. That change, plus the shared spec parts, helped level a playing field that used to favor teams with the deepest pockets and the best in-house fabricators.

The spec nature of the car created some unexpected side effects. Used Next Gen machines occasionally show up on auction sites like Bring a Trailer, usually with the engine intentionally detuned for road use. Even race-used Cup cars have become commodities in a way they never were in the 1990s.

Safety was the biggest quiet change

The crash footage in the original film came from an era when survival was partly luck. In 1990, the HANS device was not part of a driver's gear, and there were no pit-road speed limits. The assumption made the movie's biggest wrecks feel even more dangerous.

The sport learned through tragedy. A crew member was killed on pit road at Atlanta in November 1990, and NASCAR responded in 1991 with pit-road speed limits. Dale Earnhardt's death in the 2001 Daytona 500 made the HANS mandatory for every driver. SAFER barriers began appearing the following year, and the Car of Tomorrow arrived in 2007 with a reinforced roll cage and taller roof. The Next Gen car is still an unfinished project: after drivers reported that its stiff frame transferred more impact energy, NASCAR revised the rear chassis structure and bumper ahead of the 2023 season.

For a sequel, this is a storytelling problem. A modern wreck in a modern Cup car usually ends with the driver walking away, shaken but intact. Filmmakers building drama out of crashes have to find new ways to create tension when the machine is engineered to absorb the hit.

The team owner replaced the notebook

Robert Duvall's Harry Hogge was the heart of the original garage. The character drew heavily from real crew chief Harry Hyde, and the authenticity went all the way to the car: the City Chevrolet decal on the hood belonged to Rick Hendrick's actual dealership. Cruise got his racing start for the film when he and Paul Newman tested for Hendrick Motorsports at Daytona in January 1987.

Hathaway's engineer-owner character arrives in a completely different business. NASCAR moved to a charter system in 2016, giving teams guaranteed starting spots and turning the sport into a franchise model. The 2024 charter agreement between NASCAR and teams, which followed months of public negotiation, added a clearer revenue-sharing structure and gave charters a defined value. Owning a team today is as much about the balance sheet as the toolbox.

Because most teams buy chassis, bodies and components from the same suppliers, the mechanical edge that Hogge hunted with a wrench has shifted to simulation data, setup sheets and pit strategy. That is a rich area for the film to explore, and the studio has not yet revealed how the plot plans to use it.

The characters are still the point

The original worked because the drivers felt like stars. Richard Petty, Rusty Wallace, Neil Bonnett and Harry Gant all appeared as themselves, and the current paddock is already showing interest in the sequel. Dale Earnhardt Jr. has reportedly been advising the writer for nearly a year, and Cruise made a point of touching Kyle Busch's empty seat at Daytona while filming the announcement.

Paramount is betting the culture still has box office pull. The 1990 film grossed $157.9 million worldwide on a $60 million budget — a solid hit at the time and a sign of how broadly NASCAR's personality-driven appeal translated to the general audience. Repeating that equation in 2028 will require respect for both the old mythology and the new realities.

So the trade is there for debate. NASCAR traded carbureted engines, hand-built cars and brutal accidents for fuel injection, spec parts and drivers who survive crashes that used to be fatal. Whether that exchanged the sport's soul along the way is the question Cole Trickle will have to answer — on screen and off.