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While the Fast & Furious movies are about cars, they’re also about family. What started out as a movie about street racing and stealing DVD players quickly became a franchise that had a lot of emotional depth as well as some insane storylines.

That said, while the plot of the movies have gotten crazy, so has the stunt work that’s gone into making those movies. Since the franchise still revolves around cars, most of those wild stunts involve cars. Here’s a look at that time the Fast & Furious franchise made replicas of a $5 million car and wrecked all of them.

A 1966 Chevy Corvette on display at a car show
A rare 1966 Chevrolet Corvette | David Pierini/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

‘Fast Five’ and the turning point of the franchise

Before Fast Five premiered, the franchise, while successful, wasn’t as big of a franchise as it is today. That all changed with Fast Five, which did a lot of things to change things up.

First, it introduced Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s character, Luke Hobbs, into the franchise. Secondly, it set the tone of craziness that the next movies would all have.

There’s a lot of insane action scenes in Fast Five, and there’s a lot of the emotional oomph that the franchise is known for, too. For example, in the movie before Fast Five, Michelle Rodriguez’s character, Letty Ortiz, dies.

Then, in the middle of the credits of Fast Five, there’s a teaser that shows that Letty is in fact, alive. This is not only a massive twist, but it’s also the type of insane storytelling that the movies will be doing from then on. 

The other insane stuff in ‘Fast Five’

In one of the last action scenes in the movie, the crew is trying to drive away with a massive steel vault that they stole from a Brazilian police station. They drag the vault around by towing it with their Dodge Chargers. While this is kind of crazy, they go up a gear and start using the vault as a weapon to smash their pursuers. 

Those Chargers were some cool muscle cars, but they weren’t the coolest cars in the movie. That award would have to go to one of the first scenes in the movie.

The crew is trying to steal some valuable cars from a train, and one of those cars is a 1966 Chevy Corvette Grand Sport Sting Ray. While this classic Corvette may seem like a worthy car to get stolen, in actuality, the villain just wanted a Ford GT40. So, in the end, that Corvette got destroyed.

A look at the 1966 Chevy Corvette Grand Sport Sting Ray

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As Hot Cars said, this Corvette is an extremely rare street-legal car, and very few were ever produced. As a result, it has a massive price tag of about $5 million.

However, since it’s a street-legal car, the actors actually got the drive around in one. Super Street Online said that the actors drove around in the real Corvette, but they couldn’t do stunts in it. Most of that Corvette was in mint condition, but the engine was a newer 8.2-liter V8 that got about 496-hp.

Obviously, the movie couldn’t actually destroy the real thing, so the team behind the Fast & Furious movies just built a few replicas instead. Super Street Online wrote that the production team built 10 replicas that cost about $40,000 each.

Each of these replicas looked like the real thing, and they were all given 400-hp engines. These replicas were used for the stunts, and the movie managed to destroy all of them when filming those stunts.

At the end of the day though, this was money well-spent since the train scene in Fast Five was as insane as the cars that they drove for it.

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