Fast & Furious Car Expert Answers Car Questions From Twitter

I wonder how many cars they wrecked

shooting all the Fast & Furious movies.

[crashing]

[sirens chirping]

I think we've wrecked more cars

than any other franchise on the planet.

Hi, I'm Dennis McCarthy,

head of vehicles for the Fast & Furious franchise.

I'm here today to answer your questions on Twitter.

This is Car Support.

[upbeat music]

So BullseyeBub has a question.

Bro how many gears do the cars in Fast and Furious have?

Dudes been shifting like 20 times.

Shifting always makes the scene a little bit more exciting.

And for the most part it should match

what you're seeing on the screen.

Yes, there's been a few straight line drag races

where the amount of gear changes might exceed

the transmission's available gears, but hey,

you know it makes for a good scene.

Now, if you look closely at some of the cars

we've built for the movie,

I represent them as a six speed.

A good example of that would be the Dodge Daytona,

in Fast Six.

And it was a six speed car.

We put a manual, six speed in the car and you know

my thought was that was a modified car.

It wasn't like a restored classic.

We can do whatever we want.

It helps that somatically,

because you can see the guy shifting gears,

oh, well he has a six speed,

no wonder he can keep going.

In Fast Eight, when we were in Cuba,

we built I think 10 of those 50, 52 Chevys.

And the scene is he's at the end of the race,

they're max speed,

the car spins around and he's going backwards.

So the first thing that every car guy goes is,

Man that's impossible, man.

Reverse is like first gear.

You can't go that fast.

If you look at the interior of the car,

you'll see there's two shifters in that car.

Why, because he took it out of a tractor.

It's Cuba, you gotta make do with what you have.

You need a transmission.

You're not going to go down to the store and buy one.

You're going to have to make something.

You're gonna have to find something.

In this case, he took the trans out of a tractor.

So it had four forward gears,

and it had four reverse gears.

And when you watch him slide,

he comes around and he's moving two sticks.

One of those things you're gonna

probably have to watch in slow motion

because I honestly can't even remember

if it all got featured the way I dreamed it up,

but I feel it's my responsibility

to make it look realistic, and make it explainable.

Obviously that's a challenge,

but you know I always do my best.

@caroljsroth

What's the coolest car ever made?

Bonus points for pics.

You know, there's an endless list

of cars that I love.

At least in my history and my lifetime,

what's the coolest car?

And this is actually before my lifetime,

but close, in the same decade

would be the Chrysler Turbine Car.

Now, why is it cool?

It doesn't look that great.

It's a little awkward looking,

has these strange body lines,

but it was turbine power.

So I'm going to give that credit

for being one of the coolest cars ever.

Maybe we move forward a couple of years

I'm gonna give some credit to the 4 27 Cobra.

Why, 'cause it just had a ridiculous amount of horsepower

in a very small car.

Behind me is one of my daily drivers.

It's a Hellcat powered six speed Charger.

So today when I drive that home

that'll be my favorite, coolest car of the day.

It's just one of those things,

it's always a fluid, a fluid answer.

Umair, @umzehhh,

Watching the first two Fast and Furious movies

made me wonder how did it get from what it was

to what it is now?

[upbeat music]

[tires screech]

The goal is always to top what we did previously.

Every film we try to get bigger,

better just to raise that excitement level.

To raise the carnage factor, which is one

of the things that I truly love.

I don't know how it's even possible at this point

to top what we did in Fast Nine,

but I say that on every movie,

but somehow Fast 10 will succeed.

@Korryduke,

I may be coming into some money.

So if you don't mind, what's the best kind of car to buy

to make up for a douche-y personality?

Well, I'm sorry to hear that.

You can't be that big of a douche,

'cause if you were, you would never admit to it.

So I'll give you some credit there.

This is a very broad question.

I don't know what your car needs are.

Is it a two door?

Do you have family?

Do you have people in the back seat,

do you have to tow something?

There's so many variables there,

but I would say whatever category you're digging into,

just get the one that has the most performance

and the best horsepower numbers,

and you won't be a douche anymore.

@llse_Futbolista

I wonder how many cars they wreck shooting

all the Fast and Furious movies.

I mean, if you factor in two, three hundred a movie

you're probably in that ballpark,

but I guess the bottom line is,

I think we've wrecked more cars

than any other franchise on the planet.

I think that's one of the elements

that makes these movies so great.

Fast Five with the vault was probably

the number one carnage fest of the franchise.

I mean it was just day after day after day,

we shot a lot of that sequence

in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican government

was kind enough to give us access to this huge surplus

of government vehicles that were out of service.

So we basically had an endless supply

of cars to destroy.

I think we were paying a dollar a car

was the deal we made.

It was just one of those things

that really helped the cause.

I mean, Hey, let's do it one more time.

Let's do it two more times.

Hey, let's double the amount of cars.

We just, we just had an endless supply of cars.

@drebaybay,

Every time I'm next to an 18 Wheeler, I can't help

but think of the scene in Fast and Furious.

How do they manage to drive under it?

If we go back to Fast One,

you have the truck driving,

it looks like a normal truck.

You have the Hondas swarming around it.

All of a sudden the car swoops underneath it,

that was accomplished by a hydraulic system

in that trailer that would actually raise the trailer up

allowing just enough room

for that Honda to swipe underneath the trailer.

Fast forward to Fast Seven, we felt,

Hey, this is a good time to bring it back.

We've got the GTR, we've got a truck and trailer.

Let's redo that one.

So this time we built a special trailer

that had a little more clearance than your normal trailer.

And we actually installed an air system

in the GTR where at the touch of a switch,

the car would drop about three inches,

and allow about a quarter inch of clearance

as the car made us move underneath the trailer.

I like, personally, the Fast Seven method

because basically what occurred

on film is exactly how we did the gag.

So there was no altering,

there was no raising or lowering the trailer,

two different films,

same gag done differently, but same end result.

@MadddieA19,

Dad tried to explain car engines

to me and I have never felt

that dumb in my whole life.

Car engines.

I mean, there's so many different types of motors.

There's rotary motors.

There's two stroke motors.

There's four stroke motors,

four stroke piston engines being the most common.

So let's talk about the four strokes of the motor.

You have intake, compression, power, exhaust.

The first stoke being the intake stroke.

[engine revs]

The intake stroke, piston goes down.

So when that piston drops,

it creates a vacuum in this cylinder.

This vacuum will pull air and fuel into the motor.

Piston comes up, compresses that air and fuel,

gets right to the top,

a spark plug ignites, exploding that air and fuel.

That force of that explosion

forces the piston down.

Last step, exhaust valve opens,

piston travels up, it forces that spent burnt gases

out your exhaust pipe, out into the atmosphere.

Hopefully you understand

that the piston goes up and down now.

That piston going up and down,

changes the up and down force into a rotating force.

The crank shaft rotates,

the crank shaft goes to the transmission.

The transmission will keep your motor

in the proper power band at different speeds.

We take off from the light you're at first gear,

you've got a second gear, you've got a third gear.

If it's a Fast and Furious movie,

you go all the way up to like 16th or 17th gear.

And that's how you get down the road.

Hopefully that helped without making you feel dumb.

@awkward_duck,

What's the most ridiculous or over the top moment

in any of the Fast franchise movies?

I don't know if I want to say ridiculous,

because you know, it's all for a reason.

If we want to go to over the top,

I would say probably the Lykan building to building

to building jump, pops into my mind

as probably one of the most over the top gags

we've ever performed.

You know what a lot of people don't know

is we actually did toss a Lykan

out of a building.

The clearing the gap and making it the next building,

that we might've,

might've fudged that just a little bit.

[man screams]

[glass shatters]

But nonetheless, there was a complete set built

that was the interior of the first building.

And then there was an exterior with the glass,

and a very substantial drop.

And then there was even a crane involved

to really get that drop speed,

that elevation up even higher.

That was just one where I read the script

and I went, Whoa, okay, here we go.

Somehow, some way it actually sells.

From @lanabinkley,

I accidentally asked my husband

if a supercharged engine was better than a turbo,

and now we're in a 20 minute deep convo.

I stopped listening after 30 seconds.

I don't blame you,

because there really is no good answer for that one.

You know, this is a battle has been going on

for decades and decades and decades.

And there's a great argument on both sides.

The one big argument for the turbo guys

is that they will say turbochargers are free horsepower.

Why is it free?

Well, it's free

because you're not using the crankshaft to spin anything.

You're actually taking the exhaust,

the exhaust is blowing on a small fan.

That fan is going into a shaft.

That shaft has another fan,

they're insulated in between.

So now you have a fan that's spinning,

and it just spins because of the exhaust.

This fan can suck air

in and pressurize the motor creating boost.

So that's where you hear the term

turbochargers are free horsepower.

Now a supercharger really is the same concept,

it's pressurizing the motor,

it's forcing air and fuel into the motor,

but it uses a belt and a crank

off the crank shafts.

So the crankshaft spins,

spins a supercharger, forces air.

Why is the belt bad?

What's the negative?

Well, it draws horsepower,

like turning your air conditioner on,

you turn your AC on, it takes power

to spin that AC compressor.

Same thing goes for the supercharger.

The bigger the blower,

the more horsepower it absorbs to spin.

The payoff's always better.

You're using more power to get it all done.

In the end, you can really get the same result.

The Hellcat charger behind me is a great example.

Supercharged car, and nowadays the technology is there

to make that a very drivable and efficient machine.

I don't have the answer on what's better or worse,

I guess the next time you're at the drag strip

or watching some racing,

see what people are running

and that will maybe help solve the argument.

This is from @BasicallyIDoWrk.

That's good, it's always good to do some work.

What do they do with all the wrecked cars

in the Fast and Furious movies,

and how do I get one?

The real answer is you probably don't.

You know, I mean the thing is we usually wreck these cars.

Once we wreck 'em, they don't just go to waste.

We will recycle them.

We will use parts off of that wrecked car

to keep another car going.

We might cut the car up for interior shots.

I mean, they really,

by the time we're finished, there's very little left.

So at the end,

what we really do is we just scrap those cars.

There's nothing really left on 'em that's worth anything,

so they go right to the junk yard, they're crushed,

and then the ones that are not wrecked

end up in Universal's inventory

or at the theme parks, for a little bit of an afterlife.

@B_Real,

If you had a choice between a low rider

and a muscle car, which would you choose?

I will say that I've seen some

of the highest quality workmanship in low riders.

I mean, these cars frequently are painted underneath.

Everything's chrome, there's pin striping underneath.

Nowadays there's billet parts,

machine parts, CNC stuff.

You know, in my mind, when I think of a low rider though

I think of something that you're going really slow,

and you're just kind of cruising.

Since I like to drive fast,

I'm gonna say I like muscle cars

because they're typically built to go fast.

So both have their place.

Both are extremely cool, but yep,

I have several muscle cars.

I don't own any low riders,

but I have a lot of friends that do.

@Rob_blogging,

The age old question.

What's the difference between power, being horsepower,

and torque explained so we can all understand?

So this is a great question.

It's not an easy question

and you can get very complex with mathematical equations,

the history of it, how it came to be.

I'm going to just explain it to you in very simple forms.

Torque is really the relationship

between leverage and a twisting force.

So going back to the four strokes of the motor,

the piston is forced down,

as the piston is forced down,

it's forced down on a crank shaft.

So as piston is forcing down pressure

on the connecting rod,

which is forcing pressure onto the crank shaft,

you're applying torque right here.

If you make the stroke of the crankshaft longer,

you'll get more torque.

If you make the stroke of the crankshaft shorter,

you're going to lose torque,

but you'll be able to gain RPM.

The simple answer is, big truck towing weight,

you want lots of torque.

High revving car, you want lots of horsepower.

The way you make up for the lack of torque

in a high horsepower car is gearing.

@shillaryfox,

I wonder how much gas a Fast and Furious car needs.

Vroom vroom, I want one.

That depends on the car.

It depends on what we're doing.

There's some cars that we've built

that use a tremendous amount of fuel.

There's other cars that we built

that are fairly good on the fuel consumption.

They are about like your normal hot rod,

your normal race car.

And we've built a few cars in the past

that really did suck a lot of fuel.

One that comes to mind would be the heist truck

in Fast Five that steals the vehicles off the train.

That had a 500 plus inch V8 motor in it.

But it was a very heavy vehicle

somewhere around 7,000 pounds, giant tires.

And what really sucked the fuel down was the terrain.

We were a very soft sand.

So running a truck, in soft sand,

it's heavy with big tires.

I think we were getting

around one and a half miles per gallon,

but then, like I said when you can take

a twin turbo GTR on that car

even under stunt driving might still get

15, 18 miles per gallon.

Anytime we're on location, and we film in some very

very remote and exotic locations,

like Iceland, for instance,

we were in the middle of nowhere.

I did the nearest gas station was 50 miles away.

So we always bring our own fuel truck.

How much fuel we bring depends on what cars

we're working with and how far we are

from the nearest gas station.

So always something you don't want to run out of.

@michellecoldTW,

What is the point of car spoilers?

So on your street car

there's really no point other than cosmetic.

It just, they look cool.

That's really why you see cars around in the street

with big wings and big spoilers.

Now, if you're going 130, 140,

you're at a racetrack, you're at drag race,

they're very important.

Spoilers are kind of slang.

I mean, it can refer to a wing on the back,

it can refer to a spoiler up on the front of the car.

The real goal is to keep the car on the ground.

If you had a larger front spoiler,

that would have provided downforce

on the front of the car,

kept the front of the car glued to the ground,

not let that air get underneath it

and lift the car up over backwards.

So that's really the purpose of the front spoiler

is to keep the down force,

to keep the car on the ground.

Keep the air from getting turbulent underneath the car

as far as the rear spoiler or rear wing,

that is to keep down force

really on the back tires for traction mostly.

So streetcar, not really a big factor,

race cars, whether it's NASCAR

Indy car, F1 racing, Bonneville salt flats stuff,

very important for getting to the front or keeping the speed

and safety to keep the car from blowing over backwards.

Anyways, good question.

Fully vaccinated Clitorissa, @botofhot420,

Okay, a lot can be read into that whole title there.

What's the difference between diesel and gas,

and why can't it go in the same engine?

The main difference between the diesel

and the gas motor, there's no spark plug.

Air, fuel, compressed, spark.

That's what gets you going down the road.

Diesel is a little bit different.

Diesel requires heat and pressure,

same concept, same four strokes,

but the piston comes up,

it's compressing the diesel and the air,

but much higher pressure than a gasoline motor.

And it's that pressure and the heat

that actually ignites it, forcing the piston down.

If you put gasoline in a diesel,

it can destroy the motor.

It can absolutely just,

you're pulling the motor out.

You're putting another one in.

If you put diesel in a gas motor,

it usually doesn't destroy it,

but best thing to do is avoid that altogether.

@Leah, I'm gonna say Ski.

Somebody stole my boyfriend's

drive shaft in the middle of the night,

begging the question, what is a drive shaft,

and why is it more valuable than diamonds?

Well I'd probably rather have the diamonds

than the drive shaft,

but let's talk about first what it does.

The drive shaft basically transfers power

from the transmission to the rear end.

If you have a front wheel drive car,

it's going to be a CV axle,

rear wheel drive, all wheel drive car,

you're going to have some drive shafts.

Now, why is it valuable?

It's really not that valuable.

So whoever stole it had to have had

the exact same car because that's not a common thing.

I think if I were you and your boyfriend,

I'd be driving around the neighborhood

I'd be looking for a car just like yours,

that maybe had some performance mods,

where the guy applied too much power

and broke his drive shaft,

but it's probably someone close to you

with the same car that took it.

And I would say the value

of a drive shaft is anywhere between 400 and $1,200.

So I hope you find it.

Okay, we have Spot Blots writing in,

Why is the transmission

of my 95 Mitsubishi Eclipse automatic slipping?

Well, you made a terrible mistake,

and you should have bought the manual with trans.

There's just something that's not right

about a 95 eclipse with an automatic.

They should all been manual transmissions

and problem would never occurred.

@kkyraadkins,

How do you go full speed?

And even over the speed limit when it's pouring?

What kind of tires you have?

Because if I tried that I'd be spinning

into oncoming traffic.

First off don't speed when it's pouring.

That's probably the common sense answer to that,

but definitely don't go over the speed limit.

And if you are driving fast in the rain,

make sure you do have the proper tires.

A tire that's designed for the rain

will have basically different grooving in it.

Maybe more grooving, deeper grooving.

It's designed to shed the water away

from the tire and out the sides.

The last thing you want to do is drive

in the rain at any kind of speed

with bald tires or slicks or anything along those lines.

That's why, if you ever watch a NASCAR race,

as soon as you start seeing some raindrops

on the windshield, that's it cautions out.

We're done racing.

We're gonna wait for it to dry.

The track has to get dried.

Why?

Because the slicks have zero traction

in the rain and wet weather.

They just don't work.

Now you go to F1 racing and I wish,

that all forms of racing would follow this lead,

When it rains, they don't stop the race.

They change their tires,

they put their rain tires on and they get back out there.

There's definitely a skill level

with driving in the rain.

It's similar to drifting.

Like if you're a good drifter,

odds are you're going to be great at driving in the rain.

Something you should do cautiously,

closed track is a good place

to start that practice.

And you'll see, it's really all about the tires,

and your level of skill.

Use caution.

@CarNewsUpdates,

How exactly does Dominic Toretto

blow his engine on his Charger in The Fast and the Furious

during the railroad drag?

I wasn't really involved in that movie,

but I'm gonna do my very best

to answer the question for you.

So if you watch that race,

they're neck and neck,

they're both giving it everything they've got.

I'm gonna say his car either burned a hole

through a piston or a broke a piston ring,

because all of a sudden everything starts going haywire.

He's losing power.

You start seeing smoke.

There's smoke coming out from under the car.

So that's typically a catastrophic failure.

So the question is,

well, how does he continue to go so fast?

Well, you know, he has an eight cylinder,

so maybe he lost one cylinder,

and he still has seven left.

And he has a ton of boost being fed by a supercharger

into that motor.

So even though something's failed,

maybe that piston is now only half

as powerful as it should be,

but it's still making power.

It's still going to get the car down the track.

That's my best explanation on it.

@joseph3jacobo,

Don't get the people revving your engine.

Like what's the purpose of it?

Good question.

And I totally agree with you.

There is no point.

There's nothing more annoying than some guy sitting there

at the light revving his engine 20 times.

It does nothing.

So yeah, I think it'd be better

if you want to seem less douchy,

don't sit there revving your motor.

One of the worst things you can ever do

is start your car up when it's cold,

and the oil hasn't warmed up and circulated

to the motor and you start revving your motor,

you can actually really do some damage.

Just going off this photo,

this is from the Joker.

Watching the end of Fast and Furious Six,

Oh my God.

How long is that runway?

That's a great question.

I think the math, when you calculate speed,

time, distance, comes out to be about 26 miles long.

So it is a very, very long runway.

Luckily for us.

'Cause we had a lot of action going on.

We actually were on an airport

out in Northern, north of London.

It was like a three hour drive.

It was a remote location.

I want to say it was like a military base.

It wasn't like an airport that was open to the public,

but cool place.

It was huge.

And I don't know how long it was,

but it was probably two and a half miles.

So it was three miles.

I mean, when you stood there and looked down

and you couldn't see, you know, it looked like you were

on 26 miles, but yeah, that one did stretch

out a little long.

CaRide Chilly @tchilly14__

I just saw the stunts from the new Fast and Furious.

And how the [beep] they be coming up with that [beep]?

Like that [beep] look hard.

Shouldn't they be out of ideas?

You want me to rephrase that or no?

Sorry if I offended anybody with that one,

but just reading them as they come in.

It's really a group effort to come up with

the greatest action sequences ever seen on film.

And that's what we strive for.

And there's a lot of time that goes into this.

It's not like, you know, there's boom, boom, boom.

Let's write the script.

Let's do it.

Script's written.

Everybody talks about it, discusses it.

There's testing done, there's practicing done.

There's, we wreck a lot of cars

before we even get to film.

Just trying to figure out the best way to do things.

It could be someone from the construction department

or special effects said,

Hey, I got a great way or I thought of something.

And everyone's opinion gets brought

into the conversation and sometimes

it goes nowhere.

Sometimes it's, Hey, that's brilliant.

Let's do that.

I think when you have that type of mindset,

when you're creating something like a Fast and Furious movie

it really just leads to a better final product.

Thoughts on all your questions.

Hopefully I gave you some insight,

of some information of some sort.

I hope.

Thank you all.

Have a great day.