Is vehicle racing the new benchmark for home cinema sound? F1's Oscar win suggests so

When F1: The Movie was nominated for four Oscars at this year's Academy Awards, eyebrows were raised.

However, when you saw the categories the film was nominated for – behind-the-scenes nods for the likes of Best Visual Effects and Best Film Editing – eyebrows were lowered somewhat (though still suitably raised for that Best Picture nomination).

It’s the sport drama’s one and only win which was most notable, though, and honestly deserved: Best Sound.

F1: The Movie is a rip-roaring, metal-screeching belter of a movie, and one of our Senior Staff Writers has already waxed lyrical about the pulse-pounding opening Daytona scene in our best Dolby Atmos movie scenes list.

The Brad Pitt blockbuster is the latest vehicle-focused film to win the Best Sound gong over the last few years, joining esteemed company that includes Top Gun: Maverick and Ford v Ferrari.

Our testing room is not immune – there are quite a number of films used in our home cinema audio reviewing which feature motorsports, car chases, dogfights, or various other excuses to make vehicles go extremely fast.

Top Gun: Maverick, in particular, has been a go-to for several years, so it's perhaps not surprising that F1: The Movie has excellent audio. Not only do the two share a director in Joseph Kosinski, but also much of the same crew, including Oscar-winning sound editor Al Nelson.

The car chase from Ronin, the climactic Le Mans race in Gran Turismo and even the real-life Isle Of Man TT have all cropped up as audio demo scenes over the years.

And it doesn't take a genius to see how, when done right, these movies make excellent fodder for giving your speakers a workout.

Any sort of vehicular chase or race will most likely be one of the loudest parts of a movie, pushing audio equipment to extreme volumes and even to distortion. But these scenes will also result in the most sound in a movie, with the constant rev of engines competing with shouting characters, booming announcers and quite possibly the rattle of gunfire.

A good sound system, however, will not get lost in all these layers, creating the illusion of acoustic chaos while still ensuring dialogue punches through and the narrative of the sequence remains clear.

These scenes are also great for testing dynamics. F1: The Movie and Top Gun: Maverick excel at this specifically, frequently cutting between the excessive noise outside the vehicle and the more muffled, breath-heavy soundscape inside. The Batmobile chase in The Batman is also a great showcase of this, specifically when the Penguin's car is flipped and we view this from several different angles.

Perhaps most obviously, a good car chase is a great opportunity to test directionality and surrounds, particularly if you have a Dolby Atmos system.

The chase through Matera in No Time To Die is an excellent example, with motorbikes swinging off bridges and jumping into the air in a sequence sure to put your Atmos system through its paces. And the scene ends with Bond's car doing doughnuts and spraying gunfire in a full 360 degrees – could you ask for a more perfect test of your surrounds?

And if you needed any more convincing, car chases and jet dogfights are objectively pretty damn cool. So if I were a sound engineer looking to win an Oscar, I'd look for the next big motorsports movie or car-based set piece – because when done right, it's home cinema audio at its best.

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