Porsche celebrates 75 years of motorsport
Porsche celebrates 75 years at Le Mans with a cinematic collision of past and future, directed by Jack Driscoll.
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To mark 75 years since Porsche first entered the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Porsche has created Raceborn, a cinematic celebration of the marque’s extraordinary relationship with the world’s most demanding endurance race.
The film brings Porsche’s past and present together in one impossible moment: a contemporary Porsche 911 GT3 R arrives in the middle of a 1950s Le Mans paddock, surrounded by the spectators, mechanics and drivers who helped define the earliest chapters of Porsche Motorsport.
The idea came from Sebastian Borowski at Porsche, the creative director behind Road to Le Mans, starring Michael Fassbender.
Borowski presented Academy director Jack Driscoll with a deceptively simple but hugely ambitious challenge: make the future feel completely alien when seen through the eyes of the past. Rather than simply recreating history, Driscoll approached the film as an immersive cinematic world. The 1950s paddock is crowded, tactile and alive — oil-stained mechanics, period race cars, photographers, marshals and spectators packed close to the action. Every detail was designed to feel lived-in rather than recreated, from hand-painted signage and analogue timing boards to the texture of the concrete, machinery and clothing.
At the centre of the film is a moment of pure cinematic disruption. The paddock begins in a state of familiar pre-race chaos. Mechanics make final adjustments. Drivers prepare themselves. The crowd presses towards the pit lane. Time is ticking towards the race. Then, almost imperceptibly, something changes. A strange, low-frequency hum enters the world. Faces turn. The energy of the paddock freezes.
And then the 911 GT3 R appears.Its carbon fibre, sharp lines and contemporary engineering seem almost impossibly advanced against the warmth and patina of the 1950s. The period characters gather around it in disbelief, staring at a machine that represents a future they could never have imagined.
For Driscoll, the project became an opportunity to combine the intimate human drama of his filmmaking with the scale and spectacle of Porsche Motorsport. The film is populated not simply by a generic period crowd, but by individual characters: an experienced mechanic carrying decades of knowledge, a driver preparing for the brutality of Le Mans, and spectators experiencing the race with a mixture of excitement and awe.
The result is deliberately more than a film about a car. It is about the passage of time, the relentless pursuit of progress and the idea that every generation believes it has reached the limit, until Porsche moves it forward.
Credits
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- Production Company Markenfilm GmbH
- Director Jack Driscoll
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Credits
View on- Production Company Markenfilm GmbH
- Director Jack Driscoll
- Editor SEC Studio (Studio for Editors & Creators)
- Post Production INFECTED
- Producer Tatjana Bolte
- DP Benjamin Todd
- Editor Yannis Panther
Explore full credits, grab hi-res stills and more on shots Vault
Credits
powered by- Production Company Markenfilm GmbH
- Director Jack Driscoll
- Editor SEC Studio (Studio for Editors & Creators)
- Post Production INFECTED
- Producer Tatjana Bolte
- DP Benjamin Todd
- Editor Yannis Panther
Borowski said: "Motorsport has been part of Porsche's DNA since day one. We've been racing since the very beginning of our company history, and that's exactly why 2026 has felt so special for us: it marks 75 years of Porsche in motorsport. It all started back in 1951 at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where Porsche took a class win on its very first attempt with the 356 SL. To celebrate this milestone, we built a full campaign around the 2026 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the absolute centrepiece of it was the film Our Legacy.
The idea behind the film and the script was to capture the fascination of motorsport without explaining it to the audience. It had to feel real, giving viewers the sense that they could step into this world for a moment, a world that means so much to us: the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
My vision from the start was to make it as authentic as possible. It had to feel like you were actually standing in Le Mans in 1951. That's why we brought in the real winning car from 1951, flown in from the US, alongside the current race car that competed in 2026, and had both on set for the shoot.
I also wanted to capture the spirit of motorsport itself. Every generation works to build the fastest, best car to win with, and every generation believes it's getting close to the limit of what's possible. In that sense, a racer from the 50s and a racer from today would speak the same language. What's remarkable is this: if we had known back then how far we'd come with our technology and our cars today, we wouldn't have believed it. That's the feeling the film was meant to capture, because progress hasn't reached its end, not even today.
It was also very important to me to find someone for this project who knew how to create a look that felt more like cinema, more like a big film, than classic advertising. Our Legacy was meant to feel like the first two minutes of a blockbuster. Jack's style gave me exactly that feeling.
It was also important to find someone who felt genuine and authentic as a person, because that's exactly what I wanted the film itself to feel like. Jack gave me that feeling from the very first moment. Jack came up with some interesting ideas and characters, which we then developed together, reshaping and reorchestrating parts of it along the way. On set, Jack and our DOP Benjamin Toddworked their magic and captured shots that had this incredible depth and visceral power to them.
There was one moment that stood out: seeing the historical car sitting on set, surrounded by everyone in costume. For a moment, it felt like stepping into a different time. That small car suddenly didn't feel old anymore. That's when I knew we were creating something truly special.
The feedback we've received has been extraordinary. What was truly special was the feedback from people who have worked in the motorsport industry for decades: engineers, factory drivers, and Le Mans winners. And the feedback was always the same: "This is what Porsche is all about, and something you must never lose."
Driscoll adds: "I wanted this film to feel like stepping inside a moment in history rather than looking back at it from the outside.
Le Mans in 1951 was an extraordinary and dangerous place. It was a time when the distance between man, machine and disaster felt much smaller than it does today. I wanted the audience to feel what it might actually have been like to stand in that paddock, to feel the heat, the noise, the anticipation and the uncertainty of what was about to happen.
Rather than telling one linear story, I wanted to create a world full of small, fleeting stories. A mechanic making a final adjustment. A driver preparing himself. A spectator trying to get a better view.
We placed the camera inside that world. I wanted life to unfold around it. We’re observing these people in the moments before the race, catching fragments of their lives and allowing the audience to piece together the bigger story themselves.
Making that world believable was everything. It simply wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible work of production designer Yoxa Goran Joksimović and costume designer Ivana Vasic. We arrived at an empty car park in Belgrade and they transformed it. Every surface, sign, prop, costume and background character contributed to making the period feel lived-in rather than recreated.
That commitment to reality was really important to all of us, and particularly to Porsche. The backgrounds were extended in places by the brilliant team at Infected, but there is surprisingly little CGI in the film and no AI was used. We wanted to build as much as possible for real, photograph real people in real environments and allow the imperfections and physicality of that world to come through.
Cinematographer, Benjamin Todd and I wanted the camera to remain remarkably restrained. We used a lot of static angles and allowed the action to unfold within them, rather than constantly moving the camera to manufacture energy. Ben has done an incredible job of making every frame feel rich, textured and weighty, often without any camera movement at all.
I think that restraint helps the modern car feel even more extraordinary when it finally arrives. We’ve spent time immersed in this incredibly tactile, analogue world, so when the 911 GT3 R enters it feels genuinely impossible — like the future has suddenly appeared in front of people who could never have imagined it.
The whole film was produced brilliantly by Tatjana Bolte at Markenfilm, alongside the amazing teams at Tuna + Icon, who managed to bring an enormous amount of ambition and detail together with incredible precision.
I’m incredibly proud of the film and very grateful to everyone who helped make it. It was a rare opportunity to work with Porsche on something that wasn’t trying to manufacture history, but to genuinely immerse an audience in it — and then let them experience the shock of seeing how far Porsche has travelled."
