- Hi, I'm Dennis McCarthy,
the guy behind the vehicles
in The Fast and Furious franchise.
I'm gonna talk about every major car from the franchise.
'95 Eclipse.
Yeah, that was Brian's car in the very first film.
I think, back at that time, the paint was cool,
everything about it.
I think it really fit his character,
and I think that's a car that
Paul Walker would have actually driven.
'70 Dodge Charger, I mean, this is a car that I can
go on for hours.
I mean, I think that car is really more of a
character in the franchise than just a vehicle.
It's a car with a supercharger, the bug catcher.
Through the years, I've tried
to always keep that theme consistent
with everything that Dom drives.
Part of the franchise and definitely part of Dom.
So, the '94 Supra.
That's a car, too, that I feel
is very iconic to the franchise.
It seems like the cars that get
a ridiculous amount of attention would be
that Supra and Dom's Charger,
and, really, it all stems from that
final sequence of those guys going head to head.
I love the launch, I love seeing the tires
on Dom's Charger wrinkle.
And that Supra pretty much had
everything you could do to a Supra
at that time.
Mazda RX-7.
The rotary motor was, I think, unique,
the RPM capabilities,
it's kind of one of my favorite imports.
I bring that back to the franchise later on.
My favorite aspect of that was when
Dom lifts up the seat cushion and has the multiple
miniature nitrous bottles.
I thought that was just a great moment
in the very first one.
So, Letty's '97 Nissan 240.
Yeah, that was a cool car.
You see her running that thing out at race wars.
In the year that the very first Fast and Furious came out,
that car was huge.
I mean, it was kind of like that transition from
muscle cars into the beginning of the import scene.
1994 Acura Integra.
Very easy car to modify.
There was a lot of parts available.
You could buy intake kits, exhaust kits,
camshafts, clutch kits,
and that's a car that was really part of that
big movement of import racing back in the '90s.
The Honda 2000.
The first movie was so...
It was very heavy on the imports,
and that's really what it was about.
The S2000 was another car.
It was very nimble, very fast.
Worked great right off the assembly line from the factory,
but just with some minor modifications,
you had a real performer.
2003 Mitsubishi Eclipse.
Bright purple, it had these gigantic polished wheels
which I think Roman,
or, actually, we'll say Tyrese,
you know, was heavily involved in.
I think they went through three
or four different wheel choices.
Thought the car doesn't fit my personal tastes,
I know that car was exactly what Roman wanted to drive,
and as far as the movie goes, I got to say it was perfect.
The '69 Yenko.
When I saw 2 Fast 2 Furious, I go,
man, now that thing is absolutely awesome,
and it's sitting here with us today.
Car has been restored, front to back,
has well over 500 horsepower,
has a Borg Warner Super T10, 12 bolt,
all the key ingredients, the storied muscle car.
The GTR.
I believe there's been a GTR in every single movie.
It's one of those cars that was ahead of its time.
The performance is incredible, the all-wheel drive,
like I said, it's just
something that's part of the franchise from the beginning
up until who knows?
Another Honda S2000.
It was modified beyond the normal.
It actually had a supercharger on it,
and that car can literally burn the tires
through the first three-and-a-half gears.
I don't really like to be seen driving a pink car,
but the horsepower made up for it.
So, the Mitsubishi Lancer.
The Fast and Furious franchise
really helped launch that vehicle
into being how popular it became.
Changed it from all-wheel drive to rear-wheel drive,
maybe 20% rear-wheel drive.
We've done a lot a lot of work with those cars.
Hopefully, some day Mitsubishi
comes back out with something similar 'cause it kind of
got away from that performance feel that the original
Lancers and Evos had, but
great car.
S15.
This was a car that was perfect.
I mean, when we went to do Tokyo Drift, went out to Japan,
basically, every car show we went,
every drift event we went to, it seemed like
40, 50% of the vehicles there were
gonna be an S14 or S15.
They're so easy to make drift,
or go fast, or do whatever you want to do.
It's almost basically like the car was designed
to become a drift car.
And today, if you go to a drift event, they're everywhere.
They put LS motors in these things.
They put everything in 'em.
So, the Veilside Mazda RX-7.
It was everywhere, it was in every magazine, and
we were able to make a deal with Veilside
for their one and only hero car.
The sad thing was, you know, of course,
we had to change the color, so it's almost
painful when you get a car that has, probably, a
30, $40,000 paint job.
The orange worked out great, it really popped on screen.
We ended up building, I think,
six other replicas of that car.
I take that back, we built nine.
We had to build a whole 'nother set
for Japan as well.
But the one car that was our hero car
that came directly from Veilside
had somewhere around 600 horsepower,
a gigantic turbocharger,
and I just remember one night down in Lower Grand
where he literally had that car sideways,
just blowing the back tires off of it
for probably 300 feet.
So, a good one.
Once again, we bring back the Evo in Tokyo Drift,
which, like I said, was just a car we had to have,
and that was the one that was completely
converted to a complete rear-wheel drive only.
We didn't have to do that much to the motor,
I mean, we did do some computer work, some exhaust work,
but other than that, it worked great just as is.
So, the '67 Mustang.
When I read the script for Tokyo Drift,
the Mustang opened up a great opportunity
to do something different.
We actually went with the R34 engine
in Han's Silvia.
Cool part about it was we actually built this car.
It was 100% functional.
We actually did a bunch of drag race tests,
and it ran, I think, a 13.0 at 114 miles an hour.
The 13.0 doesn't sound that impressive,
but you have to realize we had
tires that were set up for drifting,
they were very hard compound.
So it burned rubber through half the quarter mile.
Like I said, everything you see on screen is real.
The shots where the car's
driving without the hood and we got the camera
was a shot that I begged for just because I said,
"Look, man, no one's gonna believe this car actually is
"a functioning vehicle unless you actually
"show it with the hood off."
We were pretty proud of ourselves because it was just such a
unique vehicle.
In Tokyo Drift, we actually had a VW Van,
And this car was for Twinkie.
Twinkie was kind of a small guy, looked fairly harmless,
but when you pissed him off, it gets crazy.
So that's really the story behind the VW Van.
The Buick Grand National from Fast and The Furious.
It's a car that was built in a time
when American performance was really at
one of the all-time low points.
But the Grand National somehow broke through
with it's turbocharged V6.
It was a car that, with very little modifications,
could dip into the 12-second quarter mile times.
And what we did is really just lower the car to the ground
a little bit more, put some black NASCAR-type wheels on it,
and it goes down as one of my favorites.
So, Fast Four, we get into another Subaru for Brian.
I read the script and I said,
"Hey, they're down in Mexico,
"they're driving through dirt roads."
I said, "Oh, hey, this has to be a rally car."
Subaru came up and said, "Hey, we'd love to help you out."
We basically put a roll cage,
changed up the paint, the wheels, and the tires.
Eliminating all the computer things
that prevent us from doing the stunts we need to do,
and boom, we're good to go.
All survived up until the end,
where we had to launch them out of the tunnel.
I think we pretty much destroyed every one we had, but,
you know, the car performed flawlessly as they always do.
So the R34, you know, once again,
this car keeps coming back around and around and again,
and it comes around and around for a reason,
because they're so cool.
I mean, the Skyline, the GTR,
I think it's at the top of the list.
Paul Walker himself actually owned one.
He has an R34.
1970 Chevelle SS.
That's one of my personal favorites.
I drive a '68 SS Chevelle myself.
It worked for his daily street car.
When the challenge came up to enter the race,
he had to modify it, you know,
once again overnight.
Turned it into, basically, the gray primer version
with the American racing wheels.
Car featured a big block, manual four-speed,
pretty much cool on every level.
The '71 Skyline.
One of the worst positions you can put yourself in
as a picture car coordinator is to have one
vintage car that needs to run and drive every day,
and that's exactly what we did,
'cause it was obviously a car that I couldn't duplicate
unless I, you know, flew one over from Japan.
Did everything we could to prep the vehicle,
and we were driving that car, and, you know,
I think it was 100-degree heat.
It falls into that category of
the perfect car for that scene.
The Gurkha military vehicle.
This is a car that, when Hobbs is introduced
into the franchise in Five, you needed that,
you needed something that just fit his character,
and when I saw the Gurkha, I thought, you know, man,
it's not gonna get any better, this vehicle's perfect.
It's big, it's burly, it's mean.
It drives through walls, it drives through houses.
We actually had one that was a legit,
and then we had a couple that were basically fake
without all the armor plating and everything else,
just to make them a little more nimble.
So we had a couple of what I'll call
lightweight stunt versions to go along with that.
So, the 2011 Charger.
Dodge has always been a huge supporter of the franchise,
and they had just come out with a brand new model,
and we basically were working with a lot of prototype cars.
If you'll notice, one car has the red-and-blues on.
That wasn't scripted, they somehow just got
turned on by mistake,
but, you know, in the afterwards,
looking at the footage, do you know what?
Roman would be the guy to turn the red-and-blues on.
So we just left that as is.
So we get into our vault heist Chargers.
We basically assume that the team has taken the cop cars
that they've heisted and
turned them into these vehicles to carry that vault
through the streets of Rio,
which were actually the streets of Puerto Rico.
And I tell you, for those moments in the franchise
when we destroyed a ridiculous amount of stuff, that's
right there at the top, I think
Fate of the Furious might have it beat
with the zombie car scene, but I tell you,
we've probably put
150-plus cars into the scrapyard
shooting that one segment.
Here we open up and they're on this mountain road,
and this was an amazing scene.
We filmed this out in Tenerife,
on this road that was
far more dangerous than it actually appeared,
and it appeared pretty dangerous.
It was really just a great contrast, I think, of
the GTR, then the Challenger going head to head
with Dom and Brian, which is different than the normal
Fast and Furious, just straight-line drag race.
So, the Dodge Daytona,
this is car that I really wanted to build.
I brought it up a few times in the past.
I didn't really get anywhere with it,
but when we got to this film,
there was one brief moment we were actually
gonna be out on the Autobahn.
I said, you know what?
If we're going to the Autobahn,
we have to have a Dodge Daytona.
It's a car that has the aerodynamics to keep up with
European super cars.
I said, it makes perfect sense.
Well, the story deviated, the locations changed,
but the car still stayed.
It's not a replication of an original Charger.
It's kind of my own version, where we
tucked the nose back in,
obviously, we slammed the car to the ground.
We just streamlined everything.
In six, we had a scene where it was kind of like
a government-issued version of a Charger.
So I had a lot of fun with that.
We basically did kind of like
a battleship gray paint scheme.
Once again lowered 'em, changed it up to
like a Mopar 20-inch wheel.
There's really not a lot you can do
to the exterior of that car because they're so cool as is,
and when you do try to modify them,
they just don't look right.
And it looked like a car that Hobbs would have had built
in the military facility for the crew.
So, the Ford Escort Mk I,
this is a car that's a huge favorite.
When I went to the UK, I realized very quickly
that this is like the Dodge Cuda of the United Kingdom.
These cars are so popular there that
when we had our team of mechanics that were the local guys,
I couldn't get them to work on anything but that car.
If we pulled up to set, we would have a Dodge Daytona,
maybe an Enzo Ferrari, and we'd have the Escort.
All the local fans and people walking the streets
would instantly flock to the Escort.
So I will say that the UK crew
made those cars as authentic as they look on screen.
I mean, everything down to the correct valve cover.
The Flip Car, this was a really interesting car.
I mean, there's cars that we build that are
a modification of something else,
and there's cars we build from scratch,
and that's the other one that came from scratch.
Justin came to me and said,
"Hey, man, I want to build a car that can run
"into other vehicles and launch them into the air."
I said, "Man, that's awesome, that's a great idea."
And they were fully functional.
They had a 500-horse LS motor, triple 400,
V-drive units, so the motor side and the back,
power supply to a Dana 60 front axle out of a Chevy truck,
and the rear steer was basically a system that we
robbed from the monster truck industry,
where you had a toggle switch that could
self-center or maintain that angle as long as you want.
I think it was the ideal thing for Shaw to be driving.
It kind of showed Shaw's
technical side and what he was really about.
The Jensen Interceptor is a car that
Michelle Rodriguez still gives me a hard time about today.
She really didn't like that car at all.
She said, "This car is ugly, I don't want to drive it."
I said, "Look, this car is perfect, there's nothing better.
"You're in London, you've lost your memory."
There was no other choice, I was totally just dead set,
I said, "This has to be in the movie, it's the right car.
"There's nothing that matches your character
"at this point in time and in this location
"than the Jensen Interceptor."
So, the Navistar military truck.
The cool thing with that truck,
it was a real one that was loaned to us from Navistar.
It had every single
piece or modification that you would find out
in the middle of a hostile military environment.
It took a ridiculous amount of abuse.
I mean, you would be amazed what we put that truck through,
and it never, you know,
never flinched once.
The Ford Mustang, this was a car that was originally built
by Pure Vision.
That car was probably somewhere between 700,000
and a million-dollar vehicle.
We had to build several replicas,
but the hero car that you see featured in all the closeups,
the hero car you see with the hood off
in the team's headquarters was the true
Anvil Mustang built by Pure Vision.
The car community recognizes them, they know the car,
they know where it came from,
they've seen it at the SEMA Show,
they've seen it in magazines.
So it's great that there's cars like that out there from
other builders that we can borrow to
keep it exciting.
So, the 2012 GTR at the very end of Fast Six.
This is that moment at the end of the movie,
there's not a lot of action.
I want to go out and try to find
the best parked car I possibly can.
And the only problem arose
when we got to set, and they said,
"Okay, we want Brian to pull into the driveway."
God, the driveway was just a gnarly approach angle.
We accomplished that, but then, of course,
when I watched the movie, that part was cut out,
but we did make it happen.
The '67 Camaro.
We did a lot of modifications to make this car
off-road worthy.
Coilover, Sway-A-Way, Howe Steering Rack,
all the good stuff.
The Subaru that we see Brian driving in the plane sequence.
Rhys Millen did the roll cage, seats, rally car suspension.
We did have to give this car more boost
basically because we were shooting the sequence
up at Pikes Peak, where we were
obviously starving for air.
We upped the boost as much as we could,
still utilizing the stock internals of the motor.
As always, the car was flawless, never misses a beat,
starts up every time,
compensated for the altitude, and got the job done.
I think it would just disappoint every fan of the franchise
if Brian wasn't in a GTR at some point of the movie.
Brian's a little mature now, he's a little bit older,
so we kind of eased up on the modifications.
We just did some very minimal
little carbon fiber treatment,
changed up the seats, changed up the exhaust system.
A good friend of mine, John, comes in
and reprograms the system so it basically converts
90% of the power to the rear tires, 10% to the front,
which is just strictly done so we can get those
massive overseer characteristic
drift scenes that we always have in the franchise.
The '95 Toyota Supra is a car that was
a really meaningful moment for me because
this is after the passing of Paul Walker,
the filming wasn't completed, and the scene,
the script was basically rewritten where we had this
kind of parting of ways between Dom and Brian.
So it was critical that I found
the best two possible cars I could,
one of them being the Maximus Charger, which I saw
in its raw finish, widened body,
car had over 2,000 horsepower.
The only catch was it wasn't completed yet.
The Supra was actually Paul Walker's personal car,
and I think it was the right ending for that film,
to have Dom and Brian in those two vehicles.
The Challenger in 7 that Letty drives.
This is a car that once again
takes Letty back to her Mopar roots.
They were basically an SRT8, six-speed manual trans.
We had a locking differential,
better clutch just to handle the abuse
of all the stunt work,
some aggressive bumpers,
raised the stance to handle the drop out of the plane,
and the wing on the back was basically an afterthought,
it was a story point.
I love the car, Michelle Rodriguez loved the car,
and it definitely looked great on screen.
So, the Lykan HyperSport.
This car was a real tough one for me.
When I read the script, I'm thinking,
my God, this is Dubai,
these guys drive a Lamborghini Aventador
to Starbucks in the morning.
What am I gonna feature?
What can I put in this guy's penthouse?
Somebody on the crew, "Hey, check this out."
I went, "Oh my God."
I read about the car, I go,
"It doesn't get any better than this."
It's the first UAE-produced super car,
and they're only gonna build seven.
It had the hefty price tag of, I think, 3.7-million dollars,
but it was really just a point that there was only
seven produced and only seven guys were gonna have it.
Once I met the guys from Lykan,
we had a meeting,
discussed the car, discussed what they could do for us.
We really had no way to create these cars
because we had no molds, we had no CAD data.
So they actually built us
the bodies, gave us some rollers
basically on a Porsche Boxster chassis.
Everything was actual production quality,
just under the skin,
it wasn't a 200-mile-an-hour car,
but, luckily, we were only driving it
in the interior of a building, so
I think 35 was as fast as we ever had to go.
Fleetline Chevy is one of my favorites.
I just really love the fastback body style.
You know, it just kind of set it apart.
Dom's the underdog, he comes into this situation
with half the horsepower of his competitor,
and all he has to rely on is
his driving skill and his knowledge of cars.
We have the nitrous gag,
we have the valve, we show how Dom hooks it all up,
and it all makes sense.
So the Ice Charger is another one of these vehicles
that basically gets partially designed by
the task at hand.
Okay, great, we're on ice.
What can we do? What's the right car?
With Dom, you always kind of gravitate towards
the '68 to '70 Chargers being
kind of like home base for him.
So what can I do to that car to make it
just plain mean?
And then the other key factor is, of course,
making it all-wheel drive.
You can stud tires, you can do whatever you can,
but a two-wheel drive car is at a huge disadvantage
on the ice.
The A-arms are all custom fabricated.
Basically sitting the motor back almost
two feet to make room for a front differential.
We had to widen the track to make room for the CV axles.
Really, the final product did exactly what we wanted to do.
It's one of the few cars that we took out
to my first test session.
Out of all the cars I built for the franchise,
it's probably my new all-time favorite.
So, the Ripsaw is something that I had seen in the past.
I'd seen YouTube videos of this vehicle in action.
When you see the Ripsaw, it's really not that massive.
I mean, it's really probably smaller than a Chevy Suburban.
You know, it's like, yeah,
we've always got cool cars and cool trucks,
but now we actually brought a tank into it.
Like I said, it was a fun one.
So there you have it.
I hope you guys enjoyed going through
a little history of the cars of the franchise.
Make sure and check out Fate of the Furious,
you're gonna love it.