I love the movie Cars with Lightning McQueen in it.  Have you ever seen it?
I actually watched it this morning!  It was awesome!  I originally thought the character was named after Steve McQueen, but it turns out it was named after Glenn McQueen!
Interesting I had no idea.  I knew the voice was done by Owen Wilson who's a great actor. His paint was supposed to look like a Corvette I think.
Glenn McQueen was a Pixar animator.  Sadly, he died in 2002.
He died very young McQueen from melanoma  at the age of 41.  I wonder what he would have thought of the other Cars Movies that Lighting McQueen starred in?
I hope he would have loved them! In one scene, the car was painted like a Corvette C1 from the 1950s - it looked amazing!
McQueens number was originally set to be 57, Lasseter's birth year, but was changed to 95, the release year of Pixar's first film Toy Story.  I wonder how many other references there are in the movie?
That would be interesting to find out!  I do know that the design was inspired by a stock car and a Le Mans endurance racer in a curvaceous way! 
What an honor to have your former colleagues pay homage by naming the main character after you.  Sounds like he was a great guy!
storyline left both Lightning McQueen and rivals Chick Hicks ("Cars") and Bobby Swift, Brick Yardley, Cal Weathers and Jackson Storm ("Cars 3") as generic.
In order to create a cocky but likable character for McQueen, Pixar looked at sports figures like boxer Muhammad Ali, basketball player Charles Barkley, and football quarterback Joe Namath, as well as rap and rock singer Kid Rock.
The end result is a character which, despite the usually-meticulous approach to "truth to material"
, Steve McQueen and all those guys, the guys who were kind of bad and you still rooted for them. And when I read this, I thought, 'This guy is robbing a bank but you really want him to get away with it.'"
Soderbergh cites Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film "Don't Look Now" as the primary influence on how he approached the love scene between Foley and Sisco: "What I wanted to create in our movie was the intimacy of that, the juxtaposition of these