Cars of Mad Max Fury Road
We take a close look at the mental vehicles featuring in the forthcoming feast of motoring mayhem – Mad Max Fury Road
By Shahzad Sheikh
For petrolheads this is the next big car movie, an even bigger fest of high-octane-fuelled car chaos and carnage than Furious 7 – Mad Max Fury Road will make that film look like Magic Roundabout. It will feature, appropriately enough, the maddest metal ever seen in on celluloid, and they’re all for real, with nearly all the action non-CGI we’re promised.
Set to release this month, it stars Tom Hardy (Bane from Dark Knight Rises) in the title role, replacing the ageing Mel Gibson, and Charlize Theron. There’s some sort of a plot involving driving Frankenstein vehicles very fast across desert plains and crashing in extraordinary fashion.
It’s actually filmed in Namibia, not Australia but uses a lot of Australian, as well as American, metal in its crazed automotive fleet.
Here are some of the starring vehicles, and we love the fact that they all have names and the attached descriptions must be written by an actual car guy. Read them and you’ll see why. Brilliant! Can’t wait to see this.
[UPDATE – added a new video, click below to watch now!]
Here the some of the cars of Mad Max Fury Road, introduced according to the film’s blurb:
1. Interceptor
All Mad Max fans will recognise this one. It’s Max’s original muscle car, the XB Falcon coupe. A wounded beast of salvage and sand, forced offroad and running on the smell of an oily rag. Scott hat and belt driven blower intact but battered, rear tyre more rag than rubber, rusted through and rattling with one too many repairs and far too few original parts. A legend spotted in the gutter, punch drunk but still proud, left behind by history’s downwards spiral, out of place but never out of contention… simply the best, Tina.
2. The Gigahorse
This is actually a pair of 1959 Cadillac Coupe De Villes in flagrante delicto are split, widened and mounted one to the other, pitched at a rakish angle by huge double rear wheels and powered by twin V8’s slaved to a handmade gearbox capable of harnessing and harmonising the ultimate power of the ultimate leader. The flagship of the citadel’s armada, the Gigahorse is memory of past glory and pledge of future victory. Armed with whaler’s harpoon and the devil’s own flamethrower, the Gigahose is likely the first thing you hear and the last thing you see on the Fury Road.
3. The Nux Car
A super-turbocharged, nitrous-boosted 5-window Deuce Coupe. This vehicle is every hot-rodder’s dream and the perfect chariot for young Nux, a true believer and gun driver in the Citadel Armada who puts the fun back in fundamental and whose failing flesh fetishes the fury and power of the V8 he hopes will lead him to Valhalla. Nux is the deliverer of death, the fan and the fanatic. A loyal servant and lethal savant and the car is his art, hope and heart. He has cast a totem of skull and mask on the crucifix quiver that tilts toward battle and wrought a steering wheel of doll head and cable that venerates his master, Immortan Joe. Nux’s true God is the engine and his church the car.
4. The War Rig
Mutant lovechild of semi-trailer and hot rod, twin V8s end-to-end, 6-wheel drive, eighteen-wheeled leviathan charged with the barter of fluids and firearms that binds the three city-states of The Wasteland in tenuous alliance. She (and ‘she’ she most definitely is) bestrides the Fury Road, a beast of war as much as beast of burden, piloted by the most trusted warrior and heralded driver of the Citadel, Furiosa. A dozen elite war boys hunker down on the truck and trailers of this massive machine and a convoy of cars and motorbikes track with her across the desert, a finger to the apocalypse and the downfall of man. Bring it on…
5. FDK
A supercharged V8 Volkswagen, FDK operates as convoy guard from Gastown for the people eater’s Mercedes limousine: the horizontal cracking tower that is the fuel truck. FKD’s slick silver finish, the drums of fuel, the double-barrelled flamethrower and the triple exhaust pipes are love poems to teh huge machine heating and condensing and excreting precious guzzolene as it roars across the empty plains in pursuit and pillage.
6. Cranky Frank
The radically chop-topped Holden FJ Rat Rod with a 4-intake supercharged V8 hurtles a crew of two – a driver blinded by a tower of carburettors and a belt-driver blower along with a tail-gunner eating dust and spitting death and captrops from the rear tray. Cranky Frank is the trusted if psychotic point man for Immortan’s personal retinue, convoy guard and guide to the Gigahorse; the beast that the ‘S’ in car and the ‘F’ in utility.
7. The Peacemaker
Who dares to jockey a water-cooled Merlin V8 in the dry deserts of the apocalypse? The same man who marries muscle car and machine guy, tank tread and torpedo, arsenal and angst – the Bullet Farmer. A high-speed, highly manoeuvrable, go-anywhere machine with more artillery than your basic death cult and less moral compunction. The Peacemaker is a 70’s Valiant bronze whaler and devourer of desert sand and of men.
8. The Ploughboy
An EH wagon jacked up over an off-road frame and rigged with harpoon and hydraulic-driven plough to tag and drag its victims to an eventual standstill and inevitable ‘harvest’. Once a Citadel convoy vehicle, the Ploughboy was sold, stolen or salvaged and repurposed as a tractor in the Bullet Farm Plains, tilling the bloodied earth for spent cartridge, cartilage and corpse.
9. Buick
Beaten and polished, stripped and shining, straddling an extended rear diff and double rear wheels, the Buick is the standard bearer and personal guard for the Gigahorse and Immortan Joe. A back up crew of trusted war boys hunker close by to supply cover fire from a slew-ring turret and anti-aircraft gun, ever ready to make the leap as reinforcement or retaliation.
10. Mack
Mack is the Citadel tow truck, the Bulldog in charge of sweeping behind the armada collecting and recycling the spoils of war and loading the car carrier lumbering behind the offensive with precious salvage. Like the rest of the fleet Mack is a heavy-duty recovery vehicle not immune to the call of arms and hell-bent on hurling harpoons and a hail of bullets at any and all caught unawares on the Fury Road.
11. Buggy #9
The Perentti (Two T’s like in Corvette, get it?) was a classic Australian mistake – a sports car modelled after American muscle cars yet given a fibreglass monocoque body and pitched at the mid-life crisis market. Here in the Apocalypse, where mankind is having an altogether more crucial breakdown, the Perentti looks almost right yet seems to crave a very large gun to gain legitimacy and street credibility.
12. Elvis
A pair of GMC 6’s slung end-to-end on the extended chassis rails of a 3-window coupe make for the guttural rumbling of a V12. With nitrous injection and a single gunner keeping the power to weight ratio way down, Elvis earns his place as the hi-speed outrider of the War Rig convoy, the heartbeat of a barter on the Fury Road.
13. Dodge
The premier fire car of the Citadel, a flame-throwing attack dog ‘liberated’ from Gastown, pitched in the Citadel’s black livery and pressed into service in the Great Chase. An old school hot rod, aspirated with a roots blower mounted low ahead of the radiator, sucking in air and dust in near equal proportion and therefore sporting the second-to-last pair of pantyhose in Christendom as a filter. A great driver, and also nitrous assisted, the Dodge runs a healthy competition with Nux’s car. It reaches the quarry almost as quickly.
14. Prince Valiant
A fire-breating Valiant Charger V8 muscle car of Australian heritage, with paint stripped away by sandstorm and speed, and sporting the rusted metal styling of flame over bonnet and guard, the car is a Gastown Emissary armed with high-volume flamethrower and Molotov grendades and a crew of three intended for initial assault and high-speed chase.
15. The Big Foot
Weapon of choice for Rictus Erectus, the first and somewhat damaged son of the Immortan Joe. At almost 7ft tall this warrior needs a lot of car. The heavy 1940s beaten steel of a Fargo workhorse houses a supercharged V8 tamed by Turbo 400 auto transmission driving 66-inch Terra tyres via a planetary gear reduction hub set in heavy duty axles from an ex-military super tanker. Four foot of suspension travel and almost 600 cubic inches of displacement make it the only vehicle capable of climbing a fallen mountain with the Immortan himself in the driver’s seat and his son jockeying harpoon and belt-driven machine guy. Bound to end in tears.
16. Firecar #4
1970s Holden HZ ute trimmed in radial rubber and bleached bone, a Gastown chase vehicle built for brutality and BBQ, thundersticks from front and gunnels and flamethrower from the rear tray. Driver shotgun, lancers and gunner, a slick team to swamp and slow the quarry for the following polecats to pursue, pillage and plunder.
17. Plymouth Rock
The buzzards were the basest of the tribes of the Wasteland, Hyenas harrying the hunted with spike and shard, swarming in packs, snapping and sawing at anyone foolish enough to venture into the badlands surrounding the last road. Carrion eaters, they waged the war of scrap merchants not mechanics, sought not salvage and rebirth but raw material to consume; saw steel not sedan, meat not man.
18 Doof Wagon
Every army has a little drummer boy, to keep the beat and stir the heart, and the war boys of the Wasteland are no exception. Here, mounted drummers pound a Taiko beat on huge resonators built of aircon duct, while Coma the Doof Warrior, blind and disfigured, slung in a web of bungy and spread-eagled before a stack of speakers, hurtles across the desert landscape on a repurposed 8×8 MAN missile-carrier. The wail of the Banshee, the distorted lick and demented, driving bass, the call to arms and the baying for blood, all music to the ears and grist to the mill, a symphony, a song, a single scream, the soundtrack to the end of civilisation. But we go out dancing…
Movie website http://www.madmaxmovie.com
