Screen Test, Road Test: The Cars of Tokyo Drift
Video and road tests of the cars from The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift
By John Pearley Huffman, Contributor | Published Jun 5, 2006
1 Rating
The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift: Inside Line videos and road tests:
Tokyo Drift Test: Skyline-Powered 1967 Ford Mustang
Tokyo Drift Test: Drift King Twin-Turbo 350Z
Tokyo Drift Test: Veilside RX-7
Tokyo Drift Test: Rear-Drive Mitsubishi Evo IX
Tokyo Drift Test: 1971 Chevrolet Monte Carlo
Tokyo Drift Test: V8-Powered 1967 Ford Mustang
Tokyo Drift Test: Toyota Chaser
Tokyo Drift Test: Turbocharged Mazda RX-8
Pieced-together junkers, rebuilt hulks with salvage titles, used-up cabs and unfortunate machinery caught in floods and other natural disasters are the backbone of the movie car industry. After all, getting an old Crown Vic cop car up a pipe ramp so that it barrel rolls three or four times in spectacular obliteration doesn't demand much from the car except that it be cheap enough to destroy.
Cars in films are there, like everything else in films, to create a false reality that the public will suspend its disbelief in for a couple of hours. It's not important for those cars to do anything. All that matters is that they appear to do what the story demands. So, in short, most movie cars are expendable garbage. And if taken to a test track, they'll prove it.
Most, however, isn't all, and some of the cars built for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift are exceptions to the rule — they had to perform. This is a movie that was using CGI to heighten the peril in some situations, but not as a substitute for real stunt driving or real drifting. But considering past experiences, it was still a surprise when so many of the nine cars the production's picture car department brought to Inside Line's testing venue proved capable, interesting and even fun. Beaten up, yes, but still not complete junk.
Modified to a task
The more than 200 cars built for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift weren't optimized to generate impressive acceleration numbers or grip the skid pad with record stickiness, but to perform specific stunts or to reflect specific elements in the film's story. For a great number of cars in the film, that meant drifting. And drifting isn't something easily done without plenty of power.
"You can't jump in a drift car, or any car, and just do it," said Second Unit Director and Stunt Coordinator Terry Leonard. "It's got to be prepped right and the car has to be right to do this kind of stuff. I think we're at a cutting edge. When this comes out, it is going to display a whole new way of driving in the film industry."
The problem for the production is that how the audience imagines a drift car should look (or at least what the director and producer think the audience wants a drift car to look like) and what drift cars actually look like are different things. One of the most prominent machines in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, for example, is an orange-and-black late-model Mazda RX-7 featuring a Veilside "Fortune" wide-body kit. Visually, this 80-inch-wide car has the impact of a thrown brick heading straight for your nose; it's blocky, menacing and if you can see it, it's already too late to avoid it.
But the rotary engine powering it, even though it has been extensively modified, only has (according to a chassis dynamometer test) 256 pound-feet of peak torque with which to churn its massive 305/25ZR19 rear tires — not really up to the athleticism required for drifting. So the production carefully took time to carve tread off those Toyo Proxes tires so that while they were still 305 millimeters wide, their contact patches with the pavement were those of much smaller tires.
Of the Tokyo Drift cars built to satisfy particular story points, the most intriguing is the '67 Mustang fastback with the 2.6-liter turbocharged DOHC straight-six from a Nissan Skyline GT-R under its hood. There's no standard kit available for transplanting the modern metric-system-and-computer-designed Japanese power plant into the ancient American's inches-and-slide-rule-era engine bay, and the Nissan engine was plumbed to be fit in a car with right-hand drive — the Mustang's steering column would run pretty much straight through the turbos. In the fictional universe of the film, the conversion takes place overnight, but it took the Tokyo Drift picture car department months to complete. But it runs and it runs well.
Off the street and on the track
One thing all the Tokyo Drift cars — from Chevrolet Monte Carlos to Toyota Chasers — had in common was that none of them were titled for operation on public streets. The streets used in filming were closed at the time and the cars would commute back and forth from location to shop aboard transporters. So we aren't able to tell you what it's like to drive these cars over the speed bumps in the Target parking lot, or what it's like to commute in a twin-turbocharged, right-hand-drive 350Z. And anyhow, what would be the point? You're not going to buy any of these.
So all the Tokyo Drift cars arrived on transporters at the testing venue and we put the radar gun to them. We can now tell you what it's like to get into cars that have instantly become part of the collective automotive culture — and some cars that were pretty dang quick.
Tokyo Drift Test: Skyline-Powered 1967 Ford Mustang
Tokyo Drift Test: Drift King Twin-Turbo 350Z
Tokyo Drift Test: Veilside RX-7
Tokyo Drift Test: Rear-Drive Mitsubishi Evo IX
Tokyo Drift Test: 1971 Chevrolet Monte Carlo
Tokyo Drift Test: V8-Powered 1967 Ford Mustang
Tokyo Drift Test: Toyota Chaser
Tokyo Drift Test: Turbocharged Mazda RX-8
Tokyo Drift Test: Skyline-Powered 1967 Ford Mustang
Tokyo Drift Test: Drift King Twin-Turbo 350Z
Tokyo Drift Test: Veilside RX-7
Tokyo Drift Test: Rear-Drive Mitsubishi Evo IX
Tokyo Drift Test: 1971 Chevrolet Monte Carlo
Tokyo Drift Test: V8-Powered 1967 Ford Mustang
Tokyo Drift Test: Toyota Chaser
Tokyo Drift Test: Turbocharged Mazda RX-8
Pieced-together junkers, rebuilt hulks with salvage titles, used-up cabs and unfortunate machinery caught in floods and other natural disasters are the backbone of the movie car industry. After all, getting an old Crown Vic cop car up a pipe ramp so that it barrel rolls three or four times in spectacular obliteration doesn't demand much from the car except that it be cheap enough to destroy.
Cars in films are there, like everything else in films, to create a false reality that the public will suspend its disbelief in for a couple of hours. It's not important for those cars to do anything. All that matters is that they appear to do what the story demands. So, in short, most movie cars are expendable garbage. And if taken to a test track, they'll prove it.
Most, however, isn't all, and some of the cars built for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift are exceptions to the rule — they had to perform. This is a movie that was using CGI to heighten the peril in some situations, but not as a substitute for real stunt driving or real drifting. But considering past experiences, it was still a surprise when so many of the nine cars the production's picture car department brought to Inside Line's testing venue proved capable, interesting and even fun. Beaten up, yes, but still not complete junk.
Modified to a task
The more than 200 cars built for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift weren't optimized to generate impressive acceleration numbers or grip the skid pad with record stickiness, but to perform specific stunts or to reflect specific elements in the film's story. For a great number of cars in the film, that meant drifting. And drifting isn't something easily done without plenty of power.
"You can't jump in a drift car, or any car, and just do it," said Second Unit Director and Stunt Coordinator Terry Leonard. "It's got to be prepped right and the car has to be right to do this kind of stuff. I think we're at a cutting edge. When this comes out, it is going to display a whole new way of driving in the film industry."
The problem for the production is that how the audience imagines a drift car should look (or at least what the director and producer think the audience wants a drift car to look like) and what drift cars actually look like are different things. One of the most prominent machines in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, for example, is an orange-and-black late-model Mazda RX-7 featuring a Veilside "Fortune" wide-body kit. Visually, this 80-inch-wide car has the impact of a thrown brick heading straight for your nose; it's blocky, menacing and if you can see it, it's already too late to avoid it.
But the rotary engine powering it, even though it has been extensively modified, only has (according to a chassis dynamometer test) 256 pound-feet of peak torque with which to churn its massive 305/25ZR19 rear tires — not really up to the athleticism required for drifting. So the production carefully took time to carve tread off those Toyo Proxes tires so that while they were still 305 millimeters wide, their contact patches with the pavement were those of much smaller tires.
Of the Tokyo Drift cars built to satisfy particular story points, the most intriguing is the '67 Mustang fastback with the 2.6-liter turbocharged DOHC straight-six from a Nissan Skyline GT-R under its hood. There's no standard kit available for transplanting the modern metric-system-and-computer-designed Japanese power plant into the ancient American's inches-and-slide-rule-era engine bay, and the Nissan engine was plumbed to be fit in a car with right-hand drive — the Mustang's steering column would run pretty much straight through the turbos. In the fictional universe of the film, the conversion takes place overnight, but it took the Tokyo Drift picture car department months to complete. But it runs and it runs well.
Off the street and on the track
One thing all the Tokyo Drift cars — from Chevrolet Monte Carlos to Toyota Chasers — had in common was that none of them were titled for operation on public streets. The streets used in filming were closed at the time and the cars would commute back and forth from location to shop aboard transporters. So we aren't able to tell you what it's like to drive these cars over the speed bumps in the Target parking lot, or what it's like to commute in a twin-turbocharged, right-hand-drive 350Z. And anyhow, what would be the point? You're not going to buy any of these.
So all the Tokyo Drift cars arrived on transporters at the testing venue and we put the radar gun to them. We can now tell you what it's like to get into cars that have instantly become part of the collective automotive culture — and some cars that were pretty dang quick.
Tokyo Drift Test: Skyline-Powered 1967 Ford Mustang
Tokyo Drift Test: Drift King Twin-Turbo 350Z
Tokyo Drift Test: Veilside RX-7
Tokyo Drift Test: Rear-Drive Mitsubishi Evo IX
Tokyo Drift Test: 1971 Chevrolet Monte Carlo
Tokyo Drift Test: V8-Powered 1967 Ford Mustang
Tokyo Drift Test: Toyota Chaser
Tokyo Drift Test: Turbocharged Mazda RX-8