User blog:Curshburger/Cars 3 Alternate Ending: McQueen Wins

WARNING: This contains spoilers.

Please note: This rewrite is a work in progress.

Cars 3 is the third and currently most recent film in the Cars franchise, and was released in 2017. In this film, Lightning McQueen, who is now a seven-time Piston Cup champion, faces his biggest competition yet in the form of Jackson Storm, a rookie with a very high top speed who uses high-tech simulators to train for his races. Storm’s rise to fame becomes an immense inspiration to other next-generation cars, and one by one, McQueen is forced to witness his veteran friends be replaced by younger and faster racers, voluntarily or otherwise.

During the final race of the 2016 Piston Cup season, McQueen finds himself in a relatively decent second place, but refuses to finish behind Storm again. He pushes himself too hard because of this, and forgoes racing for four months. But eventually, McQueen realizes he doesn’t want to end up in the same boat as his mentor, Doc Hudson, who was no longer welcome back into the racing world after suffering a crash of his own. McQueen and Mack both head down to the brand-new Rust-eze Racing Center and McQueen finds out that the Rust-eze Brothers are selling Rust-eze in hopes that McQueen’s new sponsor, Sterling, will possess the technology that’s adequate enough for McQueen to train on in order to beat Storm.

When the big day comes for McQueen to race at the Florida 500, his farewell race, he rises up the ranks, outperforming just over half of the other racers. However, he doesn’t finish the race. What he ends up doing is forfeiting the win and sends somebody else in his place. That somebody else is Cruz Ramirez.

Ramirez was McQueen’s friend and trainer, and throughout the course of the movie, struggled to keep up with McQueen at first. However, Ramirez improved over time so much that by the end of the movie, McQueen could no longer keep up with her for more than a few seconds. This, combined with the fact that Ramirez never had the chance to experience a real race, is what caused this relay. Despite starting out almost a lap behind, Ramirez ended up trumping Storm, winning the entire race, and became the new face of Dinoco while wearing Doc’s #51.

However, despite the movie feeling just right according to director Brian Fee, hundreds of fans (myself included) disliked this movie’s ending. Many were left feeling dissatisfied by the fact that McQueen was never able to prove everybody who called him an old man wrong, and that the time and effort he put into his training was all for naught. Which is why today, I have decided to attempt to piece together my own fanfiction ending of Cars 3 where McQueen wins. This ending combines the “More Than New Paint” scene, the “Storm’s Over” scene, and some writing from the original movie. Enjoy!