MID-ENGINE MADNESS

You can only ask this question in the context of a Fast and Furious film: How do you top a ’68 DodgeCharger with a jet engine in the trunk?

Easy: a ’68 Charger with a Hellcatin in the back seat. And how exactly does a Hellcat engine, even one tuned to Demon specification like this one, top a jet engine? Because it’s real.

That’s right, kids, the jet engine sticking out the back of the “IceCharger” in 2017’s Fate of the Furious was just a prop. The car was powered by a chevy LS3V-8 pushed back under the dashboard to make room for an all-wheel-drive system. Cool stuff, but the mid-engineCharger is the real deal.

At least, two of them are.

“We actually built nine,” says Dennis McCarthy, picture car coordinator at Universal Pictures. His shop, Vehicle Effects, built the cars for the past seven Fast films and the Hobbs&Shaw spinoff.

Now, when I say we built nine, they’re not all identical,” he explains. “There’s two of them that were built with the mid-engine design and the transaxle. The rest—the name leaves me at the moment— there’s a company that makes a plastic Hellcat motor. So the rest of them have the plastic motor in place. And we actually used an LS3 with a manual-shifted Turbo 400 automatic and a Ford 9-inch rear end for our stunt cars that we just use and abuse. But yeah, a total of nine cars, two different platforms. I’d say four and a half months, they were all done and headed off to different countries.”