Patrick Dempsey, like all race car drivers, makes mistakes when competing on the track. Considering he didn't compete in a race car for eight years before his return last season, he knew mistakes would come.
Fans will get to see how he dealt with some of those in the documentary, "Destined To Drive: Patrick Dempsey’s Return To Racing," that debuts after the Cup race Sunday on FS1 at 7 p.m. ET.
The documentary follows Dempsey as he returns to racing in 2024 in the Porsche Endurance Cup. Dempsey has a lengthy racing resume, including podiums at the Rolex 24 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, before he stopped racing following the 2015 season to focus on family.
"I knew going in — and I had to be OK with this — that there would be times where I would make mistakes, and I had to be prepared for that," Dempsey told FOX Sports in a phone interview Friday. "The challenge of how much aggression could I go for without it going over the line.
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"Sometimes it works, and sometimes it didn’t."
It’s impossible not to watch the documentary and think of Dempsey as the highly successful actor who portrayed Dr. Derek "McDreamy" Shepherd in the television series "Gray’s Anatomy."
In the documentary, Dempsey talks about moving on from a wreck in practice to focusing on the next time in the car. He told FOX Sports that he did see some similarities from his acting experiences and how they helped him move on from a mistake in racing.
"You're used to making a mistake in front of a lot of people, so you're comfortable publicly sharing your mistakes," the 59-year-old Dempsey said. "You have to be thick-skinned, and you have to be experimental. Granted a mistake in front of the camera, they can always do another take.
"But in the car, it can be quite expensive."
When he did make mistakes that impacted other drivers, Dempsey said he tried to seek the drivers out and talk to them.
"The great thing about this particular series is it's developing drivers for sprint racing and endurance racing, and we were all there to learn and to develop," Dempsey said. "People made mistakes, and that was to be expected."
Dempsey said that when he was racing, at least in the moment, he never worried that a mistake (or just a matter of circumstance) would result in an injury from racing that would impact his acting career.
"There are certain things that you feel before you get into the car, but once you're in the car, you can't help but just let go of all of that," he said. "Every now and then, you might have an incident on the track where there's like, ‘Oh my goodness, that could have gone horribly wrong’ and that will affect you for a moment.
"And then you‘ve got to get focused and reset and ready to go to the next corner and let go of that."
For now, Dempsey seems content with his current racing schedule and was stoked that he got his mentor, Patrick Long (who was somewhat responsible for helping Dempsey learn from mistakes during his return), to get back in the car for some events.
Dempsey said he doesn’t have time to prepare to compete in the biggest road-racing events. But he relishes the chances he does get to compete — especially at some of the iconic road courses such as Road America and Watkins Glen.
"I always would love to continue on doing track days and doing some sprint races," Dempsey said. "The endurance races and being at that level, you have to be racing every weekend. There's no way you can be competitive unless you are constantly behind the wheel, and at this point, I don't have the time to do that.
"A program where I can be competing and be testing enough to keep my skill set up that I can jump into different races or different opportunities and feel comfortable and safe — that would be the objective moving forward and having fun with it."
And what was the objective as far as what he hopes viewers think of the documentary?
"I hope they find it entertaining," Dempsey said. "The big focus was for us was getting back into it and having the right mindset. So I think the real takeaway is really the psychological aspect and the approach to how we set out to get back into the car."
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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