1.
I was in the final stretch of college, that strange in-between season when life still feels like a series of rooms you’re passing through on your way somewhere else. And in one of those rooms, there was a woman with a laugh I wanted to hear more often and a way of looking at me that made me feel like the answer to a question I hadn’t yet thought to ask. We had a mild flirtation going, the kind that thrives on stolen glances and lingering after conversations, both of us dancing around the possibility of something more without ever quite naming it. Then one day, she discovered that I had never seen The Fast and the Furious. Her face went through a series of expressions—disbelief, horror, then a sudden gleam of opportunity—before she blurted out, “What?! It’s my favorite movie!” And just like that, she gave me an opening. We made plans to watch it in her dorm room the next day. I remember walking over with a mix of nerves and smugness, telling myself that even if I hated every second of it, at least I was flipping the script on the tired cliché of men forcing testosterone-soaked action movies on their reluctant girlfriends. I was going to be the thoughtful, open-minded one. I was going to sit through Vin Diesel’s scowling and Paul Walker’s boyish grin and emerge with a noble, condescending pat on her head for loving something so silly. What actually happened that afternoon is, as they say in the movies, between me and the memory. But it may not shock you to learn that I left that dorm room having enthusiastically given the film five stars, and that the crush only grew stronger from there. Decades later, I still can’t hear the opening bassline of “6th Day” by M.O.P. without a little jolt of something that feels like summer.
2.
In the twenty-five years since that first film tore out of Los Angeles and into the cultural bloodstream, the Fast & Furious franchise has built an empire on exactly those runaway infatuations. It’s a series that has somehow evolved from small-town street racing bootlegs to globe-trotting heist operas where cars fall out of airplanes and drive between skyscrapers, all while maintaining a strangely earnest commitment to the word “family.” The films are monuments to America’s demented car culture, yes—but they’re also monuments to something else: the pure, unfiltered joy of spectacle. They are loud, ridiculous, and proudly proud of it. The product placement is gloriously shameless, from Corona bottles shoved into every frame to Toretto’s eternally loved 1970 Dodge Charger R/T, a car that has become its own character. The acting ranges from serviceable to gloriously hammy. The storylines are threadbare in the best possible way, just enough connective tissue to get us from one impossible chase to the next. And the physics? They don’t just ignore the laws of nature—they put them in a headlock, slam them through a wall, and drive off into the sunset. But that’s exactly why we love it. These films invite us to submit to some ancient, reptilian part of our brain that doesn’t care about plot holes or character arcs. That part just wants to feel power, speed, and the beautiful illusion that we can defy gravity and consequence for two hours. We watch the movies not because they’re good in any traditional sense, but because they make us feel like kids again, pretending our bicycles were jet-powered machines and that the street we grew up on was the last quarter-mile of a race against destiny.
3.
So it made perfect sense that when Universal Studios Hollywood decided to build a cutting-edge roller coaster, they would turn to the franchise that has become synonymous with adrenaline. On Wednesday, after years of rumors and teasers and construction-area peeks, Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift officially opened to the public. The ride is exactly as bonkers as it sounds. You climb into replicas of the movies’ muscle cars—including Dom Toretto’s iconic Charger, which has never looked more menacing and beautiful in sculpted fiberglass form—and then you are propelled along more than four thousand feet of track at speeds that touch seventy-two miles per hour. That’s not just fast; that’s “your sunglasses are gone” fast. The ride doesn’t simply sit on a traditional track and go around in circles. It launches you multiple times, tosses you upside down through three corkscrew inversions, and makes you feel like you’re part of an actual heist chase, complete with the sensation of sliding sideways around corners as if the car itself has lost its grip on reality. A different version of the ride is already being prepared for Universal’s Florida park next year, which tells you that the company knows it has something special. But for now, Hollywood gets to have all the fun, and the locals—at least the ones who love screaming—are reaping the benefits.
4.
I had the good fortune to be among a small group of media people and content creators who got to experience the ride the day before it opened to the general public. No lines, no waiting, no “please remain seated with your hands and arms inside the vehicle” announcements repeated a hundred times. Just walk in, settle into the seat, and go. I’d been excited, of course. But I was not prepared for the ride itself. It starts with a deep rumble that feels like it’s happening inside your ribs, and then you’re off, blasted through the first launch section with a force that rearranges your internal organs. The sensation is less like riding a roller coaster and more like being fired from a car-sized cannon while someone plays a revving engine soundtrack directly into your ears through seat-mounted speakers. You’re thrown into corkscrew after corkscrew, each one twisting your stomach into increasingly complicated knots, and just when you think you’ve found your bearings, another launch kicks you in the back and sends you spiraling again. The whole thing is over in a blink, but it feels like a lifetime of glorious chaos. In Dom’s lead car, you can actually feel the brakes bite as the vehicle slides into a drift, a small touch of realism in an otherwise wildly unrealistic experience. I screamed. I whooped. I laughed in a way that I haven’t in a long time. And I’d like to say I kept my composure, but no. I let out a joyful, unapologetic yell each time the train rounded a corner, and at one point I shouted “TOLUCA LAKE!” at the top of my lungs. That’s the name of the wealthy neighborhood next door to the park, where residents have spent a good deal of time complaining about all the noise and screaming coming from the new attraction. I like to think I’m doing my part to make sure their complaints remain justified.
5.
After the third ride, as I staggered off on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, I found myself thinking about that afternoon in the dorm room many years ago. There’s a certain kind of joy that exists only in these fast, loud, gloriously nonsensical things—the kind of joy that’s almost embarrassing to admit because it’s so uncomplicated. We live in a world that tells us to be serious and measured and above cheap thrills. We’re supposed to care about the weight of art and the meaning of things. But Fast & Furious has always been the antidote to all that. It’s a franchise that unapologetically asks you to turn off your brain and feel alive. The ride at Universal is just an extension of that philosophy, a physical manifestation of everything the movies represent. It’s absurd, it’s overproduced, it’s almost certainly too much. And that’s the point. There’s something deeply human about wanting to feel that rush, to be pushed to the edge of your comfort zone and then thrown over it, to lose your breath and regain it in the middle of a scream. Maybe it reminds us of what it felt like to be young, to not yet know the weight of every consequence, to be okay with letting go. Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it’s just the joy of being in a car, real or imagined, with music blasting and the road ahead disappearing under your wheels, and someone you like sitting next to you, laughing at how silly and wonderful it all is.
6.
As I stepped out into the California sun, heart still pounding, I thought about how far both I and these movies have come. That crush I had in college? We went our separate ways, as college crushes often do. But every once in a while, when I see a Charger or hear that familiar bassline, I think about her, and I’m grateful for the afternoon she gave me. Because that afternoon taught me something important: that it’s okay to love something without irony, to enjoy the ride without needing to deconstruct it, to let yourself be a little breathless and foolish. Hollywood Drift reminded me of that all over again. You can ride it once and have a good time. You can ride it three times and feel like you’ve been through a small war and come out the other side grinning. You can shout the name of an annoyed neighborhood to the wind and feel like you’re part of a secret joke with the universe. This is what the franchise has always been about—finding family in unlikely places, embracing the chaos, and never, ever being too cool to say “let’s go again.” So if you find yourself at Universal Studios Hollywood, do yourself a favor. Get in line, climb into Dom’s Charger, and let the track take you. Let the launches punch you in the chest. Let the corkscrews scramble your thoughts. And when it’s over, if someone asks you what it was like, don’t try to be clever. Just tell them it was fast, it was furious, and you loved every second of it. That’s the whole point. And if you happen to be shouting out the names of neighborhood subdivisions as you go—well, nobody’s stopping you. Except maybe the residents of Toluca Lake, but they’ll get over it. They always do.
