Many characters from "Cars" are drawn from real cars. Some are difficult to recognize, and some are exact copies of a real car. For example: Fillmore, Michael Schumacher, Snot Rod, Mama Topolino, Natalie Certain and many others from the cars movie are real car models.
Are Lightning McQueen, Chick Hicks, and Strip "The King" Weathers based on real drivers? Lightning and Chick are generic personifications of certain eras in NASCAR's history. They're not based on specific real drivers. Chick is a typical '80s stock car, modeled after a Buick Grand National.
Lightning McQueen is not based on a particular vehicle. Lasseter explained that the shape of NASCAR cars was problematic due to being shaped quite flat for aerodynamics, but this meant that their designs were not very interesting.
Doc Hudson is based on the real-life Fabulous Hudson Hornet in NASCAR competition, with Hudson's racing career most closely resembling that of Herb Thomas, the record holder for the highest career win rate (55 of 228 races, or 21.05%), and the first-ever two-time champion.
Strip "The King" Weathers (voiced by Richard Petty) is a veteran race car and racing legend. Weathers is an anthropomorphic version of Petty's 1970 Plymouth Superbird, sporting the same shade of blue and Petty's racing number, 43, as well as being a fictionalized version of him.
Strip is based on a 1970 Plymouth Superbird with a 426 cubic inch hemi (about seven liters) engine, the same model Richard Petty drove. The Superbird was a heavily modified version of the Plymouth Road Runner, specifically designed for stock car racing. Its radical design was later banned by NASCAR.
His name is a possible reference to actor Carl Weathers. Cal's number, 42, could be a reference to 1942, the year Lynda Petty, Kyle Petty's mother and voice of Cal's aunt Lynda Weathers, was born.
Like McQueen, she's not directly based on a single car, but her design elements mix and match that of a 2017 Toyota 86/Scion Fr-S and the 90s Honda Civic Del Sol.
He has the most voice actors in the entire series, totaling at 4. 86, Chick's number, is most likely a reference to 1986, the year that Pixar was established.
Story supervisor Nathan Stanton said: "we felt, after really tooling around with the idea of him being in the film and how do we properly use him, it just felt right that we should have his character have passed away also [as Paul Newman]." John Lasseter said that he realized "Doc Hudson was Paul Newman.
Old favorites from the other Cars movies are still in “Cars 3,” including announcer Darrell Waltrip's Darrell Cartip; Tex Dinoco, voiced and inspired by promoter H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler; Jeff Gorvette, AKA Jeff Gordon; The King, voiced by Richard Petty, Mrs.
Dinoco may have been based on the Sinclair Oil Corporation (incidentally, the namesake for the Sinclair family in the TV sitcom Dinosaurs), which also uses an Apatosaurus in its logo.
Disney and Pixar's Cars may have hit theaters in the summer of 2006, but production of the film started many years earlier, with production designer Bob Pauley first sketching the film's female protagonist, Sally Carrera, in 2002. As her surname suggests, Sally is an anthropomorphic Porsche 911 Carrera.
Flo is simply based on a Motorama Show Girl, modeled after a 1957 GM Motorama Show Car. She is a modified 1955 Lincoln Futura with large tail fins. Her license plate reads "SHO GRL", a reference to the fact that she was a show girl before she came to Radiator Springs.
Ramone is a 1951 Impala low-rider who loves riding “low and slow.” He runs Ramone's House of Body Art, the local custom body and paint shop. A true artist, but without many customers to paint, Ramone changes his own paint job every day.
In addition, Lightning McQueen's racing number was originally going to be 57 (a reference to 1957, Lasseter's birth year), but was changed to 95 (a reference to 1995, the year Pixar's first feature film Toy Story was released).
The number #95 on Lightning McQueen. 95 is a number that appears in several Pixar films. It is a reference to the year when Pixar's first movie, Toy Story, was released: 1995.
Even though Chick didn't appear in Cars 2, players can download him for Cars 2: The Video Game. It was also unknown why he didn't appear in the second film, as it never revealed what really happened with him following his pyrrhic victory in the first film.
Who is he: Strip Weathers, aka The King, is a 1970 Superbird who has, you guessed it, won more series races than any other car in history. His paint scheme is the Dinoco Blue (which looks amazingly like Petty Blue) and he wears No. 43.
She takes some inspiration from the Jaguar F-Type SVR , Chevrolet Corvette C7, and the Ferrari F12 Berlinetta. While training with McQueen, Cruz has a yellow livery with the Rust-eze Racing Center emblem on her doors.
Ward says McMissile has design cues from a number of vintage European sports cars, but is really based on the Peerless GT, an obscure British model of the late 1950s. McMissile's fastback shape, prominent grille and wire wheels place him solidly in the period from 1955 to 1965.
Lizzie is a 1923 Ford Model T 2-door sedan. Her name comes from the fact that the Ford Model T's nickname was the "Tin Lizzie." Lizzie is the oldest car to appear in the movies; Stanley is older but is only shown as a statue.
