![]() And you have to be careful, too, because the steel is bare and unpainted it's rusty and if you scratch yourself you're going to need a tetanus shot. Getting to the driver's pod means stepping around a bunch of tubing, stepping past some Plexiglas, and then lowering yourself into the narrow seat. And the front tires (315/35R17 Hoosiers) are the same size as the rear tires on the old 1995 Corvette ZR-1. It's so big overall that its massive Hoosier 31-by-16.5-inch Pro Street rear tires (think 419/55R17) look almost modestly sized. While the ramp car is very low, it's also very long and very wide, stretching out about 160 inches over a 130-inch wheelbase. The V-drive reverses the power flow so a small driveshaft can then feed the rear axle. It sends power into a GM Turbo 400 three-speed automatic transmission that in turn churns a Casale V-drive gearset that's mounted just behind the driver. Rated at 430 horsepower in the catalog, it's essentially the same engine that powers the Chevrolet Camaro SS.īut the LS3 is mounted backward in the ramp car. So the ramp car uses the same 6.2-liter LS3 V8 from the GM Performance catalog that McCarthy has installed in other vehicles for the film. So I've been going with fuel-injected crate engines ever since." "But then I realized that the young mechanics I was hiring didn't have any experience with carbs anyhow. "I used to stick with carbureted engines because I thought they were simple," said McCarthy. ![]() The other two pods were supposed to be used by supplemental bad guys in another chase scene that was eventually cut from the script and wasn't filmed. There are three separated passenger pods on the ramp car, but only the center one has driving controls. The steering is hydraulic both front and rear, with the front operated by a conventional steering wheel and the rear by a lever similar to that used on a monster truck. In back there's a Dana 60 solid rear axle held up on another pair of airbags and located by three links. The front suspension comes from a 3/4-ton mid-'80s GM pickup truck with air springs replacing the original coils. The ramp car is built around a ladder frame made from 3-by-6-inch rectangular steel tubing with a lattice of welded steel tubes above that. So forget exotic materials like carbon fiber or a power plant that spins up to some five-digit number. After all, it's not built to race it's built to perform in the fantasy world of a movie. Dennis McCarthy's ramp car, on the other hand, is built to be rugged, reliable and simple. In the end, he built seven.Īn F1 car is, by its nature, a high-tech machine. It would work with the story and look something like an F1 car, but it really has nothing to do with F1 at all. So McCarthy went back and designed something from scratch. But director Justin Lin thought, since the story took place in Europe, the ramp car should be something closer to a Formula 1-style car. When originally conceived, says picture car coordinator Dennis McCarthy, the ramp car was going to be something massive: a big truck with some sort of foldable contraption on its nose. So that's what the ramp car is designed to do: get underneath other cars and throw them up into the air. Like drive into other cars, forcing them to fly up in the air and crash spectacularly. That is, evil twins as in a squadron of drivers that parallel Toretto's group, but are evil.Īnd evil people do evil things. But likely isn't certainty and in Fast & Furious 6, Toretto's bunch meets its evil twins. Over the previous five Fast & Furious films it's been established that Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his adopted family of good guy thieves are likely the best driving crew on earth. Call it the "ramp car" or the "flip car" or whatever. In Fast & Furious 6, what the truly nasty villains are driving is this: a custom built, wedge-shaped, tube frame, midengine, four-wheel-steering monster. In any movie, the heroes can only prove their goodness by going up against truly nasty villains.
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