Mazda RX-7 veilside fortune

Veilside, one of Japan's biggest automotive aftermarket companies, assembled this Mazda RX-7 to demonstrate its "Fortune" wide-body kit at the 2005 Tokyo Auto Salon. Colored red, it had everything a show automobile should — an HKS T04Z single-turbo conversion kit, a massive intercooler shoved below the frontal bumper, large Rotora brake system, A'PEXi coil-over shocks and vast 19-inch Andrew Evo-V wheels inside P255/30ZR19 front and P305/25ZR19 rear Toyo Proxes radials. The audio system could rip open the car's sheet metal at quarter-volume, and there were allots of customised consoles and Veilside's own D1 R seats. As a matter of fact, the Veilside RX-7 was so amazing that it won the Grand Prix award as the best car in the show.

So this machine was a legend before Picture Car Coordinator Dennis McCarthy saw it and concluded it should, repainted Sunset Orange Pearl, co-star in The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Veilside also assembled 3 duplicates for the movie while the Tokyo Drift should built up three more visual clons — including one destined for wipeout using a Mazda RX-7 that appeared in both early Fast and Furious movies as its base.

Because of this car's 80-inch width, its dimensions are inconvenient — it's hardly twice as long as it is wide. There are waves in the repeatedly restored body (although the carbon-fiber hood is beautiful), and the interior long lost its lustre, but the Veilside RX-7 has the bearing of a champion. If there's a complaint, it's that the added rear window splitter and tall rear spoiler pretty much wipe out rearward visibility.

Mazda rotary engines love to rev, and given adequate turbo pressure level can produce startling horsepower numbers — even if their peak torque output stays decent. But this car was beat up during the production and on the chassis dyno it developed only 306 horsepower at 6,650 rpm and 256 pound-feet of torque at 5,950 rpm at the rear wheels — better than stock, but nowhere close its potential. More significantly, there was little low-end torque to get those big wheels turning. It took 6 seconds for the flying brick to hit 60 miles per hour and 14.1 seconds to run the quarter-mile at 104.5 mph. Stock third-generation U.S.-spec Mazda RX-7s easily bettered those times when they were being sold new in the '90s.

It is hard to imagine drifting the Veilside RX-7, with its four corners so far apart and such compromised visibility. But this car is so visually catching, it doesn't need to drift to draw attention.