Forgotten movie cars: The Ford Mustang from "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift"
Just walk in, deliver a bag of coal and then leave? The yakuza won't let him off the hook that easily. A car race is to decide once and for all who has to leave the city: Upstart Sean or the uncrowned "Drift King" Takashi. But what to drive? Because the night before, the police confiscated all the cars in Sean's team's workshop.
However, two piles of scrap metal have escaped the eyes of the law enforcers: the completely destroyed Nissan Silvia with turbocharged RB26 in the backyard - and the engine-less '67 Project Mustang in Sean's father's garage. In no time at all, Sean and his friends combine the two to create a drift-ready racing prototype, complete with bucket seats, roll cage, hydraulic handbrake - and a 350 hp Nissan six-cylinder engine in the front.
And the wave of indignation that this conversion triggered among car enthusiasts has not subsided to this day. Admirers of traditional muscle cars are outraged that someone has dared to desecrate an American classic with a Japanese non-V8. On the other hand, the Japanese faction rages that this high-tech sanctuary of an engine cannot be put into such a leaf-sprung primitive car.
As if the engine wasn't enough, the green fastback doesn't adhere to conventions in terms of looks either. In addition to the RB26DETT, it has also inherited the 19-inch Volk GT-7 and the slanted HKS stub exhaust from Silvia. Only the two white vertical stripes correspond to the usual Mustang fashion. But there was simply not enough time to paint it. Fine-tuning the suspension was more important before the race.
In this respect, Sean's Mustang corresponds to the original idea of hot rodding, that you simply make the best of what you have, more than any restomod with an unlimited budget. More than any of the immaculately built all-Japanese cars in the movie, the Nikkei American follows the philosophy of "wabi-sabi", that true beauty can only lie in imperfection - which in a way applies to the whole movie.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is now considered the least popular (and most commercially disappointing) installment in the series, despite being by far the most focused on cars and the subculture around them. And because there are no muscle-bound bald heads jumping from one skyscraper to the next, the driving scenes even look believable. A total of five stunt Mustangs were used for the drift shots - all of which had a V8 engine.
