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What's the Best Tire for Your Car?   Little known fact: During my consulting days, I spent two years doing ride-and-drive programs for GoodYear tires. I visited two factories, their corporate headquarters and underwent extensive training on what makes a good tire. All the dealers used to say that the most frequently asked question was, "what's the best tire for your car?" My job was to train the tire dealers about the GoodYear tires so that they could speak intelligently to their customers about the advantages of using GoodYear tires. After each training session (there were two per day), I'd get out on a road course and do some performance driving with a passenger car, a sports car and a light-duty pickup. each with dealers riding shotgun. After years of selling tires, consuming tires, shredding tires and blowing out tires, I already considered myself to be somewhat knowledgeable about tires. Turns out, I learned a lot. I already knew the difference between passenger tires and UHP (Ultra High Performance) tires. I knew about drag slicks, DOT radials, even funny car tires (from my experience servicing drag teams during my tenure at NGK Spark Plugs). In my youth, my job at Super Shops gave me the opportunity

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  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT2gsN4EXCc&t=197s   Fast Five Mongo Truck from Fast Five   Hello again, Fast fans, Craig Lieberman back with ya. This week, I’ve answered the many requests to learn about this vehicle.   Riddle of the day: what’s old, rusty and goes anywhere it wants?   Harvey Weinstein’s wiener? Nope.   It’s the Mongo truck from Fast Five. Officially dubbed the Heist Truck, it was yet another creation from Dennis McCarthy’s brilliant picture car team, and this thing was purpose-built to reek havoc.   By Fast Five, all semblances of the street racing culture in these movies have been cast aside in favor of heist movies.   As was the tradition with Hollywood’s Picture Car industry, tuner cars were cast aside in favor of big ole, V8 muscle cars and trucks.   Cause we Americans love them, there big block Chevys, small block Fords and pick em up truck.   The result? Universal stopped building show cars for these movies and started building all the cars pretty much as stunt cars. In other words, they would be these cars with whatever stunts they had planned for them in mind.   The build plan basically followed the action sequences written into the script.   In Fast Five, Universal needed a way to hijack and offload cars from a moving train.   Since no production vehicle could do

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Fast & Furious: Stunts That Went Wrong   This is video about some of the stunts that went wrong on some of the Fast and Furious movies.     https://youtu.be/PzNAxnq78f4   STUNTS THAT WENT WRONG   It’s hard to argue that the Fast and Furious franchise is now the undisputed king of car related stunts.   After 20 years and eight movies so far, we’ve seen cars launched into the air, driven off a cliff, dropped from parking garages and crushed by a tank. The action sequences in the more recent Fast movies are seemingly designed just to dispose of unwanted cars. As of this writing, we’re waiting on the release of Fast 9, which has promised to have a sequence in space. Whether a car is involved or not is anyone’s guess. Even fans of other car movies like Bullitt, Gone in 60 Seconds, and Ronin have to be impressed by the stunts in the Fast movies. Sure, more advanced CG helps, but the stunt teams on the Fast movies make the practical shots look spectacular. And while CG is playing bigger roles in movies these days, action movies are nothing without stunt people. Since the earliest days of movie making, stunts have been part of our favorite movies. These men and women make stunts seem

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  The Fast and Furious: Rejected Cars In this video, I cover the cars that were rejected for the first movie. Basically, why we picked what we picked and why some cars were ruled. Full transcript below the video.     https://youtu.be/qKxAyErDPZ4   VIDEO TRANSCRIPT   REJECTED CARS FROM THE FAST & THE FURIOUS   What would have happened if this car had replaced the Supra as the main car in the first Fast and Furious movie? Would Supra prices still be so crazy?   What if Johnny Tran drove a Mustang instead of an S2000? Would Race Wars spectators have been run over?   This and more in a moment.   OPEN: There have been many great cars in the Fast & Furious movies over the years, but the cars from the first movie have become icons. Some of them have sold for insane prices at auctions after the film’s main star, Paul Walker died in 2013.   The manner in which cars are normally chosen for a movie goes something like this: the Director, Producers and the Picture Car Coordinator discuss the options and a decision is made based on a myriad of factors. The car needed to fit the character, it needed to be suitable for the action sequences written into the script, and had to fit into our meager

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  There were plenty of things Universal got right, but with a project this unique, you had to expect that a couple of things might've slipped through the cracks. In this video, I try to explain the errors and how they came to pass.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQnYJa4U-nQ&list=PLCOhVHzNDzFBfdMwHG5I10mHRW8wPBB_U&index=1&t=52s   Fast & Furious Technical Errors Explained

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Fast and Furious 10 and Fast 11 Approved   It should be no secret that the Fast and Furious will be going into a tenth installment - I've been saying this for years. But now it seems, an eleventh film will wrap the franchise as we know it.  We've known for many years that the Fast and Furious movies would likely go all the way to a tenth film - Vin Diesel has long had the option written into his contract, according to sources. However, getting to “Fast 10,”  will be meaningful symbolically. Diesel recalls a 2013 interview in London with Walker, whom Diesel refers to as "my brother Pablo," before his co-star's death: "He was always tickled by the fact that we were continuing. He was always so excited and so proud that his brother was thinking of these films before the studio, and even before anyone knew that there was another one coming and another one coming and that the stories had been worked out for him. He took great pride in that.” During the interview, Diesel says Walker asked him, “Vin, how many more do you think there will be?” Diesel’s response: “The question is, is it seven, eight, nine, or seven, eight, nine, 10?” “And

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Perhaps the most repeated question I get is this one: How can I build a replica Fast and Furious car?   There isn't one answer to this question because obviously, it depends on which car you're trying to build. If you're trying to replicate one of the cars from any of the movies AFTER Tokyo Drift, it will be MUCH easier because most of the cars from Fast 4 onwards were little more than tires, wheels, mufflers and some parts needed to perform stunts.   So for the sake of this article, let's focus on the idea of building a replica of one of the cars from the first three movies. Spoiler alert: it'll be a multi-year project and will take tens of thousands of dollars and literally THOUSANDS of hours scouring the internet for every classified sale page on the internet - Ebay, Facebook marketplace, ModFinds, individual Facebook Classified pages and so on.   BUDGET: If you want to build a Supra replica (from the first movie)  or a GTR replica (from the second movie), you better have $100,000 cash in your hand, right now. And no, an 18-year-old kid is not going to get a $150,000 loan from a bank to build a 20-year-old movie

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  I've resisted the temptation to post this mostly because I don't want people to think I'm bragging. However, if you look at the list, there's hardly much to brag about.   I imagine my story isn't much different from those who follow me on social media: I started with a hand-me-down car, which I promptly modifying. I eventually learned that trying to fix up a crummy car with almost no available aftermarket parts make such an endeavor a very poor choice.   I learned quickly, however, and moved on to cars that were wholly embraced by aftermarket performance parts.   Having grown up in the 1970s, my school's parking lot was full of American iron - Chevelles, Mustangs, Monte Carlos,  Buicks, Chevy Vegas, Chargers, Satellites, Cudas, Camaros, and other cars. I've ridden in pretty much every car ever sold in America from the model year 1964 to 1988.   By the time I got my driver's license, I already knew that the 1970s and 1980s were a dark time for cars. Laden with restrictive smog equipment, these cars were choked. For the 1978 Pontiac Trans Am (from Smokey and the Bandit), horsepower came in at 185, and torque was 320-lbs.ft., measured at the flywheel (in California).   American cars of

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Why did I sell my movie cars? I get this question so often, I felt it was time to spell it out. There are several reasons why I let these cars go.   For those of you who don't already know, I was the owner and builder of the orange Supra and the blue Nissan Maxima in the first movie. I also owned the silver Nissan Skyline GT-R in the second movie.    I had purchased these cars long before Universal came up with the idea of making these movies. As I tell the stories in my videos about these cars, Universal rented the cars from me and hired me as a technical advisor for. the first two movies.   The Supra was yellow before the movie and Universal chose to paint it orange and chose the graphics and wing for the car.   This was NOT what I wanted. I could have lived with the orange paint, the body kit, and maybe even the wing, but the graphics had to go. I was advised to refrain from changing a "valuable" movie car.   What most people don't understand is that in our little tuner car world, many people thought the first movie was a joke. It was a stereotypical

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Superchips Calls it Quits Due to COVID 19 The Facebook that greeted me this morning had the ominous headline - Superchips calls it quits due to COVID 19. The irony was not lost on me. It just so happens that in my Instagram Live session yesterday, a follower asked me what my thoughts were on the move away from internal combustion engines. As the discussion progressed, I touched upon the future of the automotive tuning world once hybrids and fully electric propulsion systems become the only choice.   The conversation then continued when someone asked about what were my predictions for the future of the tuning hobby - the ability to modify one's vehicle through some sort of programming device. More on that in a moment.   Of course, when I woke up this morning to this note posted on the website of Superchips UK, I was surprised: ***Important Announcement*** Superchips Ltd. Due to the current COVID 19 situation, we have taken the difficult decision to place Superchips Limited into liquidation and have instructed Quantuma to assist with this process. Thank you for your incredible business and support over the years. We alongside Quantuma will be working together over the next few weeks in order to assess whether we can sell