Fast and Furious 7: secrets of the stunts

Laugh all you want about the Fast and Furious
franchise, but you have to admire the sheer
chutzpah of a film that happily throws fully-built,
customised cars out of a goddamn cargo plane
for a few minutes worth of footage. Real cars,
with zero CGI.
Fast and Furious 7's car co-ordinator Dennis
McCarthy explains. "Everyone was shocked when
they found out we threw real cars out of the
plane," he says. McCarthy has been working on
the franchise since the third instalment, and
realises that even by F&F's stunt-tastic
standards, this was a big one.
Step forward the cars: Dom's 1968 Dodge
Charger, Letty's 2015 Challenger SRT, Roman's
1968 Chevy Camaro Z/28, Brian's Subaru WRX
STI, and Tej's Jeep Rubicon.
It's just one bombastic scene in a film filled to
the brim with bombast. And fire. And explosions.
And a $3.4 million limited edition supercar
FLYING THROUGH BUILDINGS.
TG.com sat down with Dennis as he explained the
builds for this seventh instalment of the FF
franchise, which hits cinemas this week. Are you
ready to shift through an inexplicable number of
gears? Here's our F&F7 crib sheet...

All cars use either a new Dodge V8, or a Chevy V8
engine with manual gearbox
As in Fast and Furious 6, Dennis realised that all
the ‘hero' cars needed the same powertrains to
make work easier for the stunt team, and of
course, eliminate any unnecessary downtime that
could have hurt the filming schedule.
So each car was stripped of its original engine
and drivetrain package - "we don't have that
luxury of waiting for the car's original drivetrain
to perish and then fit new ones" - and prepped
with new internals.
"Dodge developed an engine package for us based
on the SRT8 motor," he says, "with a standalone
wiring harness, so for this film we used some of
those engines, and a Chevy V8 like before. This
time they're pushing out around 530bhp."
Dennis knocks on wood. "We're successful in that
we've never held up the schedule because of a
broken vehicle," he says.