A 1.2 rating? Really?
Pardon the vulgarity, but the AB-users who voted "1" (there are 188 of them out of 288 voters as of today) must've had a real hard-on for this movie. It obviously is not a prime example of a race-car subgenre, but it is entertaining. When I saw it as a teenager in 1960, the worst things about the movie, I thought, was the Eastman Color process, which seemed to emphasize the cheapness of the movie; also, some of the acting seemed amateurish because of the fact that some amateurs were used (like the kid that ate peanuts at the track). When I saw the movie on tv several years later, my opinion remained unshaken. I accepted the movie for what it was -- an action picture without arty complications.
I liked little racing pictures like JOHNNY DARK and this movie because neither aspired to be more than mere...well, racing pictures, although JOHNNY DARK stands head-and-shoulders above THUNDER IN CAROLINA as far as execution goes. I certainly enjoyed them a lot more than big budget pictures such as WINNING, or the two bloated pop features LE MANS and GRAND PRIX. Even the brief racing scenes in ON THE BEACH were more entertaining than those three movies.
If this movie had appeared on MST3K (and maybe it did and I just don't know about it), I could understand how that could mislead users into giving a very poor rating to the movie, although the users had only seen the episode of the edited movie, rather than the movie itself, as those users typically vote as though they had seen the movie rather than just the episode itself. I choose to believe, however, that the "users" who gave this movie a low rating did so in order to show how the voting can still be manipulated on imdb, although an effort was made within the past few years to clean up examples of ballot-box stuffing; after all, this site has users which have voted a routine movie (THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION) no. 1, which could be considered tantamount to voting it The Greatest Movie Of All Time. So, frankly, I don't give a big hairy about the 1.2 rating for THUNDER IN CAROLINA anymore, or the high marks the user-sheep have given SHAWSHANK, the 2 GODFATHER movies, THE DARK KNIGHT (!)...so, goodnight, Clarice.