Someone Restored the Crushed Saleen Mustang in ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’
The scene of the Saleen S281 Mustang being crushed under the wheels of a semi truck is still hard to watch, but there is a happy ending to it.
Do you remember what you did in early June 2003? Being a car enthusiast, there’s a good chance you went to the movies to watch “2 Fast 2 Furious.” If you did, then you definitely remember the scene in which a gorgeous Saleen S281 Mustang gets crushed and mangled by an 18-wheeler and how hard you cringed. In one of his latest videos, Craig Lieberman, former technical adviser to Universal Pictures, explains why that sequence wasn’t as horrible as it looked.
With the exception of the classic Dodge Charger that Vin Diesel’s character Dominic Toretto drove, the cars in 2001’s “The Fast and the Furious” were largely Japanese tuner cars. “2 Fast 2 Furious” incorporated more American muscle in it, such as the Dodge Viper and Chevrolet Corvette. As far as more mainstream American cars went, the timing was off. Lieberman says, “Back in 2002, there was no new Dodge Charger or Dodge Challenger. There was no new Camaro, but Mustangs were plentiful.” And Lieberman had a personal and professional relationship with Steve Saleen.
Saleen was down with letting Universal use one of his Mustangs in the movie – on one condition. Lieberman says, “He’d provide one real S281 Mustang provided that we used his signature color, which was called ‘Liz Stick Red,’ which was named after his wife [Elizabeth].”
That Mustang was going to be the ill-fated star of an all-new stunt sequence that got added to “2 Fast 2 Furious.” Sort of. During a scene in which Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) and Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) are racing against the villainous Carter Verone’s (Cole Hauser) henchmen to get to a confiscated car, the Saleen bounces between two semis and ultimately gets crushed under the wheels of one of them.
As you probably guessed by now, Lieberman didn’t use the car Saleen loaned to Universal. That was supposed to stay intact and look great on camera. But Lieberman needed several cars that looked like the S281 to use for stunts and the crush shot. Lieberman says, “One car, the hero one, was a full-blown Saleen, serial number 00-0201. It was supercharged and had a manual transmission.” Another one of the Mustangs had a stick, but no blower. Two had a V6 and an automatic. The crash car started its life as a stock 2002 Mustang GT with an automatic.
The studio had to use special devices and digital trickery to create the scene safely. The part in which the Mustang bounces between the two 18-wheelers was created with CGI.
It was too dangerous to put a stunt performer in a Mustang and send it under the semi, so Lieberman and his team attached an empty car to a truck-mounted crane and used the crane to swing the pseudo-Saleen underneath the trailer that would reduce it to a pile of smoldering wreckage. CGI and insert shots filled in the visual gaps to make it look as if someone was in the Mustang during the accident.
Lieberman managed to keep tabs on many of the Mustangs that appeared in “2 Fast 2 Furious.” The hero car now belongs to a person in Las Vegas. Someone in Virginia bought one of the other Mustangs and added a Vortech supercharger and other mods to it. Believe it or not, even the Mustang that got crushed is alive and well today. According to Lieberman, (what was left of) it went to auction in 2004 and “was fully restored by a guy who owned his own body shop.”
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