Adam McKay reveals ‘Talladega Nights’ sequel that would’ve sent Ricky Bobby to Europe

We were this close to Ricky Bobby losing his mind over free healthcare.

Adam McKay revealed this week what a Talladega Nights sequel would have looked like, and why it never got made. The 58-year-old director told Business Insider the plan was to send Ricky Bobby to Europe to race in Formula 1, where he would struggle to keep pace with cars that make a NASCAR stock car feel like a go-kart, and become convinced he had landed in a communist country the moment he found out the hospital visits were free.

“We did have an idea for Talladega Nights 2,” McKay said. “It was that Ricky Bobby was going to hook up with an F1 team, and he was going to race in Denmark or the Netherlands and feel like he’s in a communist country because they have nationalized healthcare. So, along with struggling with how fast those F1 cars go, he would have clashed with far-left-leaning Europe compared to America.”

McKay said the sequel died not for lack of ideas but for lack of energy. Shooting race car content is an enormous undertaking, and by the time Talladega Nights wrapped, he and Ferrell were spent.

“The only reason we didn’t do it was it’s a lot of work to shoot race car stuff,” he said. “The reason we went and did Step Brothers next was we felt like, can we just go do comedy in a house? We were tired after Talladega Nights. It never got to the point where we wrote a treatment.”

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby debuted at number one at the box office in August 2006, arriving at the exact moment NASCAR was at the center of American sports culture. Fox NASCAR analyst Mike Joy credited the film as part of why the sport hit its peak for fan engagement and racetrack crowd sizes in that era. Kyle Larson took the opposite view last year, saying the movie did nothing good for the sport, a sentiment his Hendrick Motorsports teammate William Byron echoed, saying it “should not be the first thing people think of” when they hear NASCAR.

The McKay-Ferrell partnership that produced Talladega Nights, Anchorman, and Step Brothers is long gone, with the friendship unraveling when McKay cast John C. Reilly as Jerry Buss in HBO’s Winning Time without telling Ferrell, who had wanted the role himself and learned of it from Reilly. They haven’t spoken since. Ferrell, meanwhile, has moved on, making a surreal in-character appearance on Golf Channel last week to promote his new Netflix golf comedy The Hawk, which debuts next month.

Now the rest of us will be forced to move on, left with the lasting image of Ricky Bobby never making it to Europe, never standing on a F1 grid in Amsterdam, never arguing with a Dutch doctor about whether free healthcare is socialism, and never quietly conceding, somewhere on the Autobahn, that democracy, existentialism, and the ménage à trois are, in fact, three pretty good things.

Unfortunately, Ricky Bobby may have placed that evil on us after all.