World Racing League

The World Racing League (WRL for short) is an organization featured in the 2008 Speed Racer film and video game. It is an international sanctioning body for professional motorsports, holding racing events at venues such as Thunderhead, Onuris, Aurora, Skorost, Fuji Helexicon, and even the Grand Prix Colosseum, where the WRL Grand Prix is held.

For every racing event sanctioned by the WRL, there is always a group of sports commentators, each from a different country and speaking in their native languages, likely to give racing truly international representation.

From behind the scenes, it is a different story. For years, even before the events of the film, the WRL was a hotbed of corruption, in which corporate sponsors and car manufacturers, alongside organized crime syndicates, maintain an insidious race-fixing scheme to engage in double-dealing, insider trading, and stock manipulation. The finishing order of the major races are predetermined by the sponsors in advance as part of this conspiracy. Many racing drivers were either blackmailed to lose on purpose, or were paid to act as hired guns to eliminate honest drivers. The fortunes of the companies associated with the winning and losing cars fluctuate accordingly, allowing their corporate overlords to cash in, based on their foreknowledge of the outcomes.

Royalton Industries was chief amongst the scheming entities. Royalton's involvement in the race-fixing conspiracy was unraveled in the WRL Grand Prix when their GRX, driven by Jack "Cannonball" Taylor, was revealed to have an illegal spear hook device equipped to it. This helped to build the case for the C.I.B.'s investigation into the race-fixing.