Reel Life to Real Life: Tokyo Drift Mustang Is Up for Sale
Of the Fast & Furious movies, it’s the one based around drifting in Japan that features this tire-smoking Mustang Fastback.
Tokyo Drift is the bastard child of the Fast & Furious franchise. By any real standards, it’s an awful movie. However, if you watch it in the same way you would watch an old Kung Fu movie — by ignoring the plot, the characterizations, and the acting — you just may enjoy the over-the-top action, which is a lot of fun.
The movie centers on a rebellious American teenager being relocated to Japan. There he finds himself drawn into the underground drift scene.
The climax of the movie involves the hero teen and his friends engine-swapping a Nissan Skyline GT-R engine into a 1967 Ford Mustang fastback to race against the “Drift King” in an epic showdown.
Like we said, this movie is completely absurd. Also, we love Mustangs as much as the next guy, but for racing down a Japanese Mountain against the Drift King’s fully-prepped twin-turbo Nissan 350Z, we probably wouldn’t choose a 1968 Mustang that’s just had an emergency restoration and an engine swap. As it happens, neither would the stunt drivers. The two Mustangs used for drifting scenes had 430-cubic-inch Ford V8s and four-speed manual transmissions.
Now, one of the V8 stunt Mustangs from Tokyo Drift is apparently up for sale on Craigslist. Now, we are not going to authenticate this because we haven’t seen it nor the documentation the seller claims to have. However, it does look like the real deal. In an Edmunds Inside Line Video, they spent some time with the beaten up Tokyo Drift Mustang and there’s footage of the engine bay. Below, on the left is a screenshot from the video, and on the right is a shot of the engine that is featured in the seller’s ad.
As you can see, the seller’s car is pretty dusty and has an air filter, but other than that it’s the same layout. The wiring is the same, all the way down to the colors. The valve covers, the MSD box and the distributer cap also look the same. Assuming it is a movie car, it’s either the other Tokyo Drift Mustang that wasn’t GT-R engine swapped or the one featured in the Edmunds video and has since been restored.
The seller is looking for $40,000 for the Tokyo Drift Mustang. Whether that’s a good price or investment, it’s hard to tell. Han would say: “Life’s simple. You make choices and you don’t look back.” However, we would suggest some caution. Tokyo Drift may not be the worst Fast & Furious movie but it also didn’t have Paul Walker in it, and Vin Diesel only turned up at the end for a fleeting cameo.
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