Beneath The Hood of The ’70 Charger From “The Fast & The Furious”

With all the hullabaloo swirling around the excessive amount of Dodge Charger usage (and likely abuse) in Hollywood with upcoming movies like “Drive Angry” starring Nicolas Cage, and the latest installment of “Fast and Furious” series, which brought us our first glimpses of the new police-equipped ’11 Charger, it’s a wonder this short clip hasn’t gotten passed around more.

It’s an interesting side note that the film series, which was geared to highlight the performance and sexiness of the FWD and import tuning crowd inevitably ended each film with classic muscle cars at the forefront. Jeez, you tuner guys just can’t get a break, huh? Well, don’t worry. If its any consolation, we muscle car guys aren’t too happy with how each movie ended with these muscle cars in flaming heaps of sheet metal and chrome.

The most vile instance of this, of course, is from the first film where Vin Diesel’s ’70 Charger is catapulted into the air after colliding with an 18-wheeler. But, this is Hollywood after all. Can we really believe what we saw? Not entirely. It has already been revealed that the Charger’s tire smoking wheel stand was accomplished via a pair pneumatic arms that ramped the B-Body Mopar’s nose high into the air.

Moreover, the savvy HEMI lover will attest that the shiny chromed elephant pictured beneath the hood of Vin’s Charger isn’t a 2nd Gen. 426 HEMI at all, rather a 392 1st generation plant. Movies use several cars for movies like these and as the video below reveals, even the Charger used for all the close-up driving isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:

While seeing the top of a plastic supercharger and butterfly scoop opening with the rest of the hood is a little jarring, there is some solace to be taken that the engine beneath the bonnet is indeed a Mopar big block, namely a 440 RB-Block. This is, of course, a massive improvement over the 350 small block Chevrolet-powered version of the ’70 Charger found in the fourth film titled simply, “Fast & Furious.”

Hopefully, the 5th film will actually have the stones to feature a true HEMI-powered Charger and not another sheep in wolf’s clothing.

About the author

Kevin Shaw

Kevin Shaw is a self-proclaimed "muscle car purist," preferring solid-lifter camshafts and mechanical double-pumpers over computer-controlled fuel injection and force-feeding power-adders. If you like dirt-under-your-fingernails tech and real street driven content, this is your guy.
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