Fast & Furious - Supercharged ride immerses you into the world of the films

Swarmed by a crowd of VIPs with a smattering of journalists sprinkled in, I make my into a large building that's staged as a decades-old warehouse in San Francisco. I pass a chainlink fence housing NOS bottles and am greeted by familiar four-wheeled characters: a '12 Subaru WRX STI, a '97 Mazda RX-7, a '70 Ford EscortRS1600, and a '69 Dodge Daytona. If you've seen the third, sixth, and seventh outing of the $5-billion Fast & Furious franchise, these are the films co-stars, appearing in the queue for Universal Studios Florida's latest attraction, Fast & Furious - Supercharged.

The cars all look authentic, and they should. The WRX and Daytona are actual prop vehicles from their respective films. Dennis McCarthy, the Picture Car Coordinator whose company Vehicle Effects built all of the automobiles for the Fast & Furious films, post-Tokyo Drift, provided 15 of them for the ride. For cars McCarthy couldn't source from production, replacements were built to look just like their big screen counterparts, such as the Mazda RX-7, Ford Escort, and Toyota Supra.

In addition, McCarthy built two custom vehicles exclusively for the Orlando attraction, an "A/V Truck" and a "Turbo Truck." The former's monitors introduce Ludacris's character Tej, while the latter creation represents the tow vehicle for the party bus guests ride on.