A glimpse into tuner culture: Fast and Furious exhibit at the Petersen

These early cars fell into two camps. Hero cars were returned to their owners—$25 million was too small a budget to buy them outright. But the fame those cars quickly accrued meant their owners started getting mobbed in public.

“These guys couldn’t actually show up to car meets without being totally swamped. So it’s like, ‘Oh, hey, this used to be my car, but it is apparently something else now,’” Feay said.

“That’s what happened to the Integra GSR from the first street race, ” she told me. “And essentially from there, you have the typical cycle of auctions and private owners. But the second part of this history of these cars is the replicas.”

What about the replicas?

Hundreds of replicas made by Universal escaped the crusher and were instead stored in a warehouse in Santa Clarita, California, before being repurposed with new paint and bodykits for Too Fast, Too Furious.

“It’s known as the warehouse scramble scene,” Feay said. “It’s when Brian and Roman are looking to escape from the law at the end of the film. They drive their cars into the warehouse, the garage doors close, and when they open, it’s tons of cars pouring out to distract, to draw attention away from them.”

“That’s what happened to a few of our cars on display,” she said. “And from there, they were sold to private owners. Some of them went to collections. Some of them sat derelict on people’s lawns… And they essentially went all over the world.”

Don’t expect to find many cars from Tokyo Drift, though. The movie was filmed in 2006, and the Japanese domestic market cars couldn’t be imported to the US. “They were either crushed or sold off to other places outside the United States,” Feay said. “So we were not able to get things like Han’s original Mazda RX7 or the orange and black one, which we really wanted to see here. It was just unfortunate. And then DK’s 350Z also was an unable to be located.”

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