What Engine Was In The Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift Mustang?

Years before Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) saved the Vatican City in a computer-generated Dodge Charger, there was The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006). The third installment in the ever-growing film franchise tells a fish-out-of-water story of an American high school street racer being shipped off to Japan and experiencing high-octane culture shock in the underground world of drift street racing.

The movie's final car climax shows a crew of street racers preparing a 1967 Ford Mustang fastback with a turbocharged 2.6-liter Twin Cam 24-valve straight six engine and five-speed manual transmission from a wrecked Nissan S15 drift car. This muscle car turned drift missile takes on the main villain in a sideways midnight run down a mountain. The chase scene is a thrill ride with plenty of tire shredding action and PG-13 rated fender crushing vehicular violence. However, there's more to the story about what's under the hood of this star-studded Mustang.

American producer and car fanatic Craig Lieberman was the automotive technical advisor in the first The Fast and The Furious (2001) movie and the sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003). His orange Toyota Supra was used in the first film. Since then, he's been an unofficial historian, documenting the facts on the cars built for these movies. In March 2020, Lieberman posted an interview with GT-R guru Sean Morris for his YouTube channel.

In this video, Morris sets the record straight on what went into building the Tokyo Drift 1967 Ford Mustang fastback hero car. More than a handful of 1967 and 1968 Mustang fastbacks were used for the film, with the estimated number being "six or seven." On a big-budget film, it is common to have one pristine hero vehicle for primarily photography and several identical copies to be used for the stunts.

Morris built the Tokyo Drift Mustang fastback with a single turbocharged RB26 straight-six engine bolted to an RB25 five-speed manual transmission, funneling the power to a nine-inch Ford rear differential. The suspension was set up for drifting and was fitted with 19-inch Volk Racing GT-7 wheels. Meanwhile, the other Mustangs used to drift and crash on camera were powered by Ford V8 engines. Part of the Hollywood magic in the engine bay was mounting the turbocharger high and at the front to give the audience a better view.

The thing about cars built for movies is that they also play a character. James Bond's Aston Martin is pretending to be bulletproof, Herbie the Love Bug can't actually drive 180 mph and the Duke boys' orange Dodge Charger did not survive hundreds of car jumps without any damage. Craig Lieberman's interview with Sean Morris was intended to disprove the internet rumors circling the Tokyo Drift Mustang's engine.

As Morris explains in the YouTube video, people would argue with him that the engine used for the fastback Ford Mustang was an SR20 because that's the engine featured in a Nissan S15. However, the modified S15 featured in the movie had an engine swap with an RB26 from a Nissan Skyline GT-R, hence why the Mustang had an RB26 instead of the presumed SR20. But how much power did this screen-used hero car produce in the real world?

Edmunds tested the RB26 powered Tokyo Drift Ford Mustang fastback to find out. According to Edmunds' chassis dyno test results, the star car made 340 horsepower at the wheel at 7,300 rpm and 264 pound-feet of torque at 5,950 rpm. At the track, the JDM Mustang accelerated from zero to 60 in 5.4 seconds and crossed the quarter mile in 13.5 seconds at 109 mph. It's important to note that the car's suspension was set up to slide around corners, which affected its overall performance. It was built to look good in front of the camera and slide around like a trick pony car.