Edward Hunter
Well, there were huge production troubles behind the making of the film...McQueen wanted to make more of a documentary about Le Mans guest starring him driving in the race, whereas the Studio execs wanted something more Hollywood...The end result is kind of a halfway house between the two and it's far from perfect; but the racing footage is at least awesome and enough of McQueen's original racing spirit makes it onto the screen. At one point it looked very likely that the film would never be finished at all, so the fact that McQueen compromised and the film got released at all is a bit of a miracle. There was a great documentary that came out last year called "Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans" which gives a lot of detailed insight into what was going on in Steve's life at the time and why the film turned out the way it did.