Tran & Suki's S2000

[Music] hello fast fam thanks for tuning in I'm Craig Lieberman and I've been taking ring on cars since 1980 I've owned more than 40 cars in my life some were heroes some we're zeros but never in my wildest dreams would I ever guess that three of my cars would go on to star at a motion picture franchise my Supra my GTR and my maximum all had starring roles and universals Fast and Furious movies over the next three years I'd served Universal as a technical adviser I helped choose the cars procure the parts oversee their build and support both production and post-production I have some cool stories to tell about what it was like to build these cars and to work with the cast I was there on set and the production meetings working on cars hanging with the actors and consulting on post-production so follow along as I tell the stories let's jump in if you thought the s2000 in the second movie looked familiar you're not alone as most people know the s2000 in the second film it's more or less the same car from the first film here's how that happened in the first movie we needed a car for Johnny Tran looked at several different options and decided that the best mm would be a good fit since we were working on a tight budget we chose to follow the same procedures of procuring a car for this role namely we were rented it from the owner the owner of this car at the time was RJ de verre whom as you might remember played Danny Yamada Danny was in the white Honda Civic during the first race and appeared in several different shots the s2000 went through many revision when I first saw this car it was black and it was running Andrew racing dish wheels but before the movie the car received a set of Andrew racing mesh wheels the third set of wheels on this car came just before 2 fast 2 furious and those were RJ's own signature wheels under the name brand Roja and they were called Roja GT m wheels the car was three different colors at three different times it was the factory black before the movie it was painted chroma flare blue purple just after the first movie the car was then fitted with Roja formula 5 wheels later on it was painted pearl orange and it was then fitted with the aforementioned Rohan's ETM wheels Roja as I briefly mentioned was RJ's own line of wheels produced with an existing manufacturer which was called American Racing wheels if my memory serves me correctly the s2000 always featured the Veilside body kept what you saw both movies was installed before the first movie here's where things take a weird twist although we've always touted this car is being supercharged the supercharger kit technically wasn't really installed until after the first movie but before the Hollywood premiere the very first time I saw the motor was at the Hollywood premiere the supercharger kit was a comp tech kit which is based upon a Paxton supercharger the car also had an HKS exhaust HKS suspension and the strut tower bar was from RE works therefore to be truly accurate the description in his car as it was used on-screen the s2000 was naturally aspirated what it appeared in the first movie there's no blower motor boat and no nitrous not yet in the best case scenario the car made 350 horsepower to the crank with the blower but in stock trim this car made only 240 horsepower at the crank it doesn't matter though as a stock s2000 was smoked an automatic four-cylinder jetta here are the performance specs for a stock as 2004 a stock 2-liter four-cylinder jetta the s2000 will do the quarter-mile in fourteen point nine seconds and the Jetta 2-liter with an automatic does the quarter-mile on about sixteen point eight seconds on a good day downhill with a tailwind and three midgets pushing although the car wasn't actually supercharged at race horse it wouldn't have changed the outcome jesse still would have got smoked but in this configuration Tom's rx-7 would have taken this little s2000 the gap abased if they had ever raised in real life that is for production in the first movie we had only one s2000 no stunt car no backup car no nothing this footage of the picture car warehouse shows that there are no other as to thousands on set so what do we use for a stun car well those close-ups were done using a McRib Honda Civic if you look closely at this video you can see that this is a Honda Civic from Toretto's gang and we added a few accessories to make it look like trans as mm if you look really carefully you can see the double-decker wing we used on the hijack civics in the back window after race Wars though we really didn't get to see much of the car the only others seen this car was in was a scene where an of this gang pumped oiled down Ted's throats fast forward two years and production starts up for two faster two furious once again I was heavily involved in choosing cars for the main characters this movie had a character named Suki as we all know Suki who was played by Devon Aoki was a badass racer chick she would need a hot tuna car to match her style I originally suggested a toyota mr2 Spyder and Universal tentatively agreed and we purchased and started building four of these cars then one day we got a call from the production offices over at Universal basically on the other in the line they were telling us we're going another way with Sookie's car stop what you're doing and find another car well after some discussion we decided that we'd use a Honda s2000 for this character David martyr who was my boss purchased the s2000 from the first movie outright and we got to work immediately you have to remember that it was RJ and versus Motorsports that only s2000 this time given that Sookie was supposed to get the mr2 Spyder I can't help but wonder what impact this would have had on those cars popularity there was no time to consider that back then so I just went with it in the end the producers that she would look better at a convertible we decided to use the s2000 since it looks sleeker but we had already started construction on the mr2 spiders as I mentioned these mr2s once they were done were relegated for use in the warehouse scramble Singh ultimately we had five s2000s for two fast furious hero one aka is the principal one car hero - aka principal number two stop one stunt - and a Mik rig show which started off as a gray as mm [Music] the art department was heavily involved in the visual look at this car at first they wanted the car to be magenta red as shown on this early build sheet it was then somewhere along the line decided that the car should be pink overall Universal one of the feminine animate kind of look so they hired an artist by the name of Noah Elias who had done work on many of the Alpine audio cars each car was hand airbrushed by the artist at a cost of about $11,000 per car I was assigned to spice up the rest of the car and since the outside was already more or less done I opted for gauges and audio/video the audio video came from Panasonic Rockford Fosgate lightning audio and our other sponsors apex gauges and some neon string lights were added to the interior to kind of spice it up a bit once we get the Florida the car had the interior reupholstered and two-tone pink bathroom carpet material I'm not even joking it was literally bathroom carpet since Sookie's bridge jump was deemed so dangerous we rigged the stunt car up with a remote-control device so that could be piloted by a chase vehicle I covered this in great detail in another video but suffice to say the car survived the jump but was some serious damage didn't really matter though as the car would make only one other appearance to the movies warehouse scramble scene as shown here it pops out of the warehouse as a decoy as shown here it pops out of the warehouses of decoy and would basically don't get to see the car again and with that the s2000 faded into Fast and Furious history so what happened is cars after the movie the hero one car the actual hero one car is sitting at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles California I personally viewed the car in 2009 the interior is completely sun-faded as could be expected and has kind of fallen into disrepair but the condition in the body shows signs of twenty years of being loaded on and off car carriers other than that it's mostly intact another one of our s2000 was sold to a buyer in Europe this is now owned by the same guy who bought my original Super as of late 2019 I just can't tell you where the other cars are because I don't know while there are several replicas of the s2000 and the Johnny Tran configuration I've yet to see anyone try to replicate the Suki version but if you want to see the real thing you can pay a visit to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles California tell them I sent you that's it for this episode tune in next time for more behind-the-scenes insights from the franchise thanks for watching everybody

Channel: undefined

Views: 176,451

Rating: 4.9539032 out of 5

Keywords: the fast and the furious, fast and furious, 2 fast 2 furious, Honda s2000, S2000, Johnny Tran S2000, Paul Walker, Devon Aoki

Id: R8FrzFfU7QE

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/_The_Crow_]

What has been seen, can't be unseen..

[u/ProSynysterHD]

Very much enjoy his channel. It's cool to see the franchise from his view being a part of the making.

[u/MPallino93]

Interesting video! Thanks 👍🏻