In Pixar’s seventh film the cars are, quite literally, the stars. The film tells the story of Lightning McQueen, an arrogant but talented rookie racing car who is on the cusp of reaching the big time.

All he needs to do to achieve his dream – and get the fame, sponsorship and groupies that come with it – is to win the Piston Cup.

But on the way to the big race he gets lost and ends up in the sleepy Route 66 town of Radiator Springs.

While there, he learns from the town’s offbeat characters that there is more to life than trophies, fame and sponsorship.

As ever, Pixar heavily researched the film and consequently it’s a car-lover’s dream.

Every aspect was produced in consultation with a team of automotive experts, including designers, racers, transport historians and engineers.

Due to this, the film is filled with a glut of car references.

Insects in the film, for example, are shaped like Volkswagen Beetles, because ‘Bug’ is the car’s popular nickname; the neon lights in Radiator Springs’s cafe flash in the proper firing order for a Ford flathead V8, and the licence plate of one of the film’s characters reads ‘445-108’, which is the latitude and longitude of Ferrari’s main factory in Italy.

Many famous people from the world of motoring also made cameos in the film, including Michael Schumacher and Jeremy Clarkson.

During pre-production, the creators spent months designing the characters, drawing up over 43,000 sketches of the potential cars.

Many of these characters were based on specific vehicles, but Lightning McQueen was a hybrid of several racing car models.

John Lasseter, Pixar chief creative officer, said that, due to aerodynamics, the shape of Nascar cars was relatively flat and not very interesting, and because of this McQueen was based on a cross between stock Nascar cars and the more cinematic and curvy features of Le Mans endurance racers.

The designers also added some elements from Lola race cars and Ford’s GT40 models.

Despite this amalgamation, Cars’s official website states that McQueen, voiced by Owen Wilson, can reach a top speed of 200mph, goes from 0-60 in 4.5 seconds and has a V-8 engine with 750 horsepower.

The United States’s largest automotive vehicle valuation company, Kelley Blue Book, valued Lightning McQueen at $1.5m.

On top of this, Japan’s Cars Racing, a racing team backed by Disney Japan and Toyota, replaced its racing car, the ‘Toy Story apr MR-S’, with the ‘Lightning McQueen apr MR-S’ for the 2008 Super GT season.