Shallow movie about hot cars and girls - big problem: they get the "cars" part completely wrong!

Rating: 3/10 (29 May 2011)

OK, I get it, the movie is only to show hot cars and girls, so I won't comment on the thin, improbable and hole-riddled plot. Instead I'm going to list just a few thing that are wrong about the cars in the movie, which I'm guessing was designed for viewers who largely have no clue about cars, maybe because the target audience is slightly too young to drive, i.e. early teens? Well, here goes: 1. NOS seems to be the solution to everything. There is a lot more involved to make a car go fast, yet the shop is full of NOS, NOS, and more NOS parts! Oh, and exhausts, because everyone knows loud exhausts are the 2nd most important thing that makes a car go fast ;-) 2. The car "tops out at 140", let's add some NOS (surprise!) and it'll go faster. If your car tops out at 140, NOS will not help you one bit. Maybe you're running out of gears, maybe the engine should be built for higher revs, but NOS won't change anything about your top speed! 3. The best qualities of the type of cars driven, modern Japanese cars, are cornering and handling. What do they do? They have a drag race on a straight instead - wrong car for this purpose, any average US muscle car will beat the hell out of the Jappa there with less money spent on it (and conversely, a modern Japanese car will leave an average old US muscle car in the dust in an actual race involving lots of corners).
4. Double-clutching ... oh dear, what a complete and utter nonsense! You double-clutch if you have an unsynchronized transmission - very unlikely - and even then only when you down-shift (which you never do in a drag race!) 5. 140mph is fast at the end of a quarter mile, but not that fast in principle, there are *many* European and Japanese cars that have a top speed around that figure or higher, even "family cars".
6. Nitrous oxide doesn't run out after a few seconds (lines in the movie indicate a racer has used his NOS boost "too early").
7. If Vin is serious about drag racing, he wouldn't have a sound system weighing a ton in his car. Note, there's a scene where the geek is explaining how to save 2-3kg of weight on the car they're building later on, so on the other hand they do seem to be interested in saving weight.
8. Towards the end, Vin drives the Charger and does a monstrous wheelie. You don't get that kind of traction/wheelie on anything but big fat racing slicks, yet the car has pretty normal tires on it.
9. While we're at it - the tires are smoking while he does a wheelie?! Wheelie means you have grip. Smoking tires means you don't have grip. Which is it?!? 10. A car like that Charger would definitely have a wheelie bar, especially since a wheelie as big and exaggerated as the one shown in the movie would just cost you time.
11. If you're serious about 1/4 mile times, you're not going to drive a FWD car, but rather a RWD or 4WD car.
12. Surely even the boy-racer scene with Jappa cars finds cheap stickers tacky (no pun intended) and would opt for real airbrush or pin-striping on their prized cars (there is one scene where they put decorative stickers(!) on a car).
13. Why would you rebuild a burnt out Supra?! Apparently their labor is free and restoring the car is done in a leisurely afternoon or something. Oh, and the engine is so special that $15k turns it into a 10s car! These are just off the top of my head, and I'm not even that knowledgeable about cars myself, so I'm sure there's plenty more wrong. The movie doesn't pretend to be anything it isn't, but at least they should have gotten the "car" parts right in what is meant to be a car movie! ...or did I get that wrong and I just watched a very long commercial for NOS (which is a brand name ;-) ?