Polanski, who had no prior experience making documentaries, recruited Frank Simon to direct after deciding to chronicle his friend's participation in the Monaco race. The two accompanied Stewart to the principality for the 1971 Grand Prix. Finance for the production came from EMI Films.
The film operated in the cinema vérité tradition — observational, unscripted, and close to its subject. Stewart later reflected: "working with Roman Polanski was very nice for me not only because he was a good friend, but when the movies come out, it's very straightforward. It's cinema vérité and it showed how it was."
Beyond Stewart and Polanski, the film captures a remarkable cross-section of the Monaco paddock and surrounding world. Fellow racing drivers Graham Hill and François Cevert appear, as do Stewart's wife Helen and team principal Ken Tyrrell. Nina Rindt, widow of 1970 world champion Jochen Rindt, is also present. The film's Monaco setting draws in the principality's celebrity circle: Grace Kelly, Prince Rainier III, Joan Collins, and Ringo Starr all appear, and Juan Manuel Fangio, the five-time world champion, is featured as well.
The film premiered at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival and received a limited theatrical release in Europe before falling into obscurity. For roughly four decades it was essentially unseen. The Technicolor laboratory in London eventually contacted Polanski to ask whether they should retain or discard the original negative. In conversations with producer Brett Ratner, the idea of restoring and re-releasing the film took shape.
Polanski restored the film from the original print, remixing and slightly recutting it to suit a modern audience. He added an approximately 15-minute epilogue in which he and Stewart sit in their same Monaco hotel room from 1971 and discuss their friendship, the evolution of racing safety, hairstyles, and the passage of time. A super 8 mm cut-down version had been released by UFA in Germany in 1980 across two reels with a runtime of approximately 33 minutes, but this was a heavily abridged edition and not the full film.
The restored version screened out of competition as an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. It received a limited US theatrical release on 22 November 2013. Universal Pictures UK issued a Region 2 DVD on 4 November 2013.
The film received generally favourable reviews upon re-release. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 71% "fresh" rating based on 14 reviews. Metacritic gives it a score of 63 out of 100 from 9 reviews, indicating "generally favorable" notices.
Calum Marsh in The Village Voice wrote that the result was "a pleasure, perhaps as much for audiences as for Polanski; it's a chance to luxuriate in the atmosphere of world-class Formula One." He described Stewart and Polanski as pottering "about Monaco like kings surveying the scope of their lands."
Mike D'Angelo of The A.V. Club awarded a B− grade and called it "a terrific primer on auto racing," while noting that the climactic race coverage was "a bit pedestrian" given Monaco's street circuit layout and the limited camera positions it afforded. He was more critical of Polanski's decision to re-edit the 1972 cut and add the present-day epilogue, suggesting these changes diluted the original's impact.
Dade Hayes, writing for Forbes, said the release was "like Christmas morning" for fans of 1970s New Hollywood cinema, Formula 1, and "exaggerated sideburns," praising the film's capture of "the swirl of royalty and celebrity in Monaco, but also the rigors of elite-level racing."
Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times gave it 2.5 stars and noted it "will appeal mostly to motor-racing enthusiasts and movie archaeologists," finding the newly added epilogue more of a curiosity than an enhancement.
Weekend of a Champion stands as one of the few substantial documentary records of Formula One at the start of the 1970s, a period when the sport was simultaneously glamorous and acutely dangerous. Its 40-year disappearance and eventual restoration give it an additional layer of historical interest, preserving a world — Monaco, the paddock, the drivers, the surrounding celebrity culture — that no longer exists in the same form.