Movie cars tend to go one of two ways at auction. They either go unnoticed and sell for what they’re worth (or less) as some regular, everyday car, because no one liked the movie or they were simply peripheral to the plot. The shabby $2300 Chevy Impala driven by Kate Bosworth in the 2002 film Blue Crush is a prime example. Or, as we witnessed this week at Bonhams’ Goodwood Festival of Speed auction, movie cars go BIG.
The dust from that auction is still settling, but when the hammer fell on the 1992 Mazda RX-7 Veilside Fortune Coupe from 2006’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the all-in £911,000 ($1,229,434) sale price became a record for RX-7s, for Mazda road cars, and for F&F movie cars.
This RX-7, like all cars from that never-ending movie franchise, was heavily modified. Universal Studios commissioned Japanese body-kit supplier Veilside Co. Ltd. to turn the sumptuous FD-generation Mazda into something nearly unrecognizable, adding almost 8 inches in width and altering every body panel save the roof. It’s enough to get the side-eye from someone cruising Miami Beach in a Koenig Specials 911.
On screen, it was driven by Sung Kang’s character Han, a retired drifter, and was used primarily for static and stunt scenes, but not drifting, and is one of two such RX-7s that remain from the film. The odometer shows nearly 67,000 miles, though a full rebuild to stock specs of the 280-hp twin-turbo rotary engine took place 5000 miles ago. The Bonhams catalog entry states: “Spared the abuse often dished out to high-profile movie cars, this RX-7 has been preserved in outstanding condition, both inside and out, and is well documented.”
Hagerty has tracked seven sales from the F&F movie franchise over the years, including that of the wild green Mitsubishi Eclipse driven by the late Paul Walker in the first film, which sold for $170,500 at Mecum Kissimmee in 2022, as well as the previous top seller, the 1994 Toyota Supra from movies one and two, which sold at Barrett-Jackson Las Vegas in 2021 for the then-eye-watering sum of $550,000. That this RX-7 result doubles the Supra price speaks not just to the ongoing cultural appeal of the popular franchise (despite Tokyo Drift ranking 9th of the 11 films, according to Rotten Tomatoes) but to the determination of two resolute bidders.
Bonhams set a presale estimate of £250K–£350K ($338K–$473K) on the car, and it drew no shortage of attention ahead of the sale. Our UK valuation analyst, Richard Salmons, reports the car absolutely stood out in the sale room—a room that included a Mercedes-AMG ONE, a Bugatti Veyron, a Jag XJ 220, and the wildest Morgan 4/4 on the planet. Once it shot past the high estimate, bidding went back and forth, eventually bouncing along in £10,000 increments between the final two bidders until the hammer fell.
The result is more than a million bucks higher than the previous $107,500 record high sale we saw for a standard FD RX-7 back in 2023. And it’s almost a million bucks higher than the previous record for a Mazda road car, a $264K Cosmo sold by Gooding 11 years ago (a 1989 767B endurance racer holds the title of most expensive Mazda overall, at $1.75M, back in 2017). And as movie cars go, it’s certainly up there, though still a far cry from the $3.74M Mecum got for the 1968 Mustang featured in Bullitt.
Of all the cars to appear in the movies of the Fast & Furious franchise, this Veilside RX-7 is arguably the most memorable, so it’s difficult to imagine something else eclipsing this result. That said, with R34 Skyline GT-Rs still on an ever upward trajectory, we may just see Walker’s silver and blue 2 Fast 2 Furious ride shake things up when and if it ever appears for sale.