A self-taught animator is doing what Pixar hasn’t bothered to do in nearly two decades. He’s making a prequel to the 2006 film Cars, and he’s filling it with loving 3D recreations of NASCAR’s most recognizable machines.
Ariya Alexander Berenji, who runs a YouTube channel called R-ya Productions, is building a fan film centered on The King, the Richard Petty-inspired character voiced by Petty himself in the original movie. The story follows Strip Weathers before the crown, back when he was just another car trying to make it on the oval.
The NASCAR DNA runs deep. Berenji has built a character modeled directly on Dale Earnhardt, right down to the number three and the menacing black paint scheme. The only concession to fiction is swapping “Goodwrench” for “Sidewall Shine,” a clever bit of worldbuilding that stays faithful to the source material without stepping on trademarks.
Weathers himself gets a visual twist. Rather than the solid Petty Blue from the original film, the younger version wears a blue-and-orange livery drawn from the later Petty Enterprises cars that carried STP sponsorship. The prequel needs to feel different from the movie audiences already know, and that particular color combination remains one of the finest paint schemes stock car racing ever produced.
Chick Hicks, Michael Keaton’s villain from the first film, shows up too. His signature green is gone, replaced by a red-and-gold scheme that any NASCAR fan will instantly recognize as a nod to Bill Elliott’s Coors-sponsored number nine Thunderbird. Elliott terrorized superspeedways in the mid-1980s, and setting this film in that decade gives Berenji room to play with an era when NASCAR was becoming a mainstream spectacle.
The project also introduces a new character. Toni Jo Torque, nicknamed “The Queen,” is a five-time champion who mentors both Weathers and Hicks. Her design blends stock car proportions with Porsche 935 cues, and her livery draws from the cars of Shawna Robinson, Danica Patrick, and Toni Breidinger. It’s a deliberate effort to acknowledge women who raced in a sport that rarely made room for them.
Berenji is building locations as well. Copper Canyon Speedway from Cars 3 appears alongside a bowling alley and an ice cream parlor that serves “frozen coolant,” because of course it does. The 1980s setting lets him lean into a retro aesthetic that fits the decade’s own fixation on 1950s nostalgia, which tracks perfectly with the small-town Americana that anchored the original Pixar film.
This is one person doing what a billion-dollar studio has left on the table. Pixar squeezed three movies and a pile of merchandise out of the Cars franchise but never explored the backstory it practically handed audiences. Petty’s character was a retiring legend in the first film. His rise was always the obvious prequel, and it took a fan with a YouTube channel to actually pursue it.
The 3D models Berenji has shown so far are polished enough to make professional animators take notice. Whether the finished film matches that quality across a full runtime remains to be seen, but the foundation is unusually strong for a solo fan project.
Berenji is posting updates on YouTube, and the level of detail in each showcase video keeps escalating. If he can sustain this pace, Pixar might find itself in the odd position of being upstaged on its own franchise by someone working out of a bedroom.
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