This Veilside Rx-7 was a legend before Picture Car Coordinator Dennis McCarthy saw it and decided to repaint it to Sunset Orange Pearl, co-star in The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Veilside also duplicate three of this car for the film while the Tokyo Drift shop built three more visual clones — including one destined for destruction using a Mazda RX-7 that appeared in both previous Fast and Furious films as its base.

Veilside is one of Japan’s largest automotive aftermarket companies, built this Mazda RX-7 to show off its “Fortune” wide-body kit at the 2005 Tokyo Auto Salon. It is Painted red, it had everything a show car should — an HKS T04Z single-turbo conversion kit, a massive intercooler shoved under the front bumper, big Rotora brakes, 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 sound system could rip open the car’s sheet metal at quarter-volume, and there were lots of custom consoles and Veilside’s own D1 R seats.This Veilside RX-7 was so impressive that it won the Grand Prix award as the best car in the show.

Because of this car’s 80-inch width, its dimensions are awkward — it’s barely twice as long as it is wide. There are waves in the repeatedly repaired body (though the carbon-fiber hood is gorgeous), and the interior long lost its luster, but the Veilside RX-7 has the bearing of a champion. If there’s a complaint, it’s that the added rear window divider and tall rear spoiler pretty much eliminate rearward visibility.

Mazda rotary engines love to rev, and given enough turbo pressure can produce startling horsepower numbers — even if their peak torque output remains modest. But this car was beat up during the production and on the chassis dyno it produced 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 near its potential. More importantly, there was little low-end torque to get those big wheels turning. It took 6 seconds for the flying brick to hit 60 mph 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’s 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 arresting, it doesn’t need to drift to attract attention.

[via Edmunds]