THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

Dodge Chargers have featured throughout The Fast and the Furious franchise – we’re now up to number ten, in case you’ve lost count, with an 11th en route. But it’s in the first of the films where the model makes its dramatic debut. When you’re Vin Diesel, you’re unlikely to be satisfied with tooling around in an AMC Pacer and thus his character, Dominic Toretto, has a 1970 Dodge Charger R/T that he admits scares even him, thanks to its BDS 8-71 Roots-style supercharger poking through the bonnet – purportedly giving its nitrous oxideinjected 426ci Hemi engine 900bhp.

Five Chargers were acquired for the film, some of which were 1969 models with 383ci engines dressed to look like 1970 R/TS. And that wasn’t all that was fake; the attention-grabbing superchargers were replicas made out of chrome-plated plastic. Two of the Dodges were modified for stunts, with tougher suspension and strengthened roll cages. For the scene where the R/T does a burnout-wheelie, a hydraulic ram produced the dramatic effect. After the epic finale crash that writes the Charger off, the wreck went on to star in a further film – it’s in the scrapyard at the start of 2005’s revival of the world’s most famous Volkswagen Beetle, Herbie Fully Loaded.

When the Charger returned in 2009’s Fast & Furious, six fresh Dodges were modified; however, it was reputedly a struggle to find enough good secondgeneration Chargers because so many had been damaged or destroyed in previous films and TV shows.