You have to pay $350 to rent this car from Hertz for one day, and you only get to drive it 100 miles. Of course you could try to save $50 and not opt for the insurance, but we both know how you’re going to drive it.

That brings me to my next point. Hertz plans to trade these cars off to the Ford dealerships after 16,000 to 18,000 miles. Now I’m sure these are going to go for top dollar at the dealerships, but I would steer clear of them. I’m sure many are going to get the “Let’s see how hard we can run this until it blows” syndrome.

This time around though it seems Ford learned a little something. With the original GT350’s in the 70’s, some customers were known to swap out engines and even weld roll cages to the chassis. Ford now has security measures to insure this doesn’t happen again.

This ought to get some blood flowing on both sides of the fence. The new movie “Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” due to be released on June 16, 2006 will feature a ‘67 Mustang, powered by a Nissan RB26DETT engine, a twin-turbo straight-six right out of the amazing Skyline GT-R. There was also a ‘Stang powered by a 430-cube Ford small-block used for some of the shots on set.

When the two were lined-up on the dragstrip, the GT-R powered pony ran the quarter mile in 13.32 seconds and 109.83 MPH - over 1.2 seconds quicker and 13 MPH faster than the Ford V8. I’m sure that left some blue-oval purists hanging their heads. I suppose I would be OK with either of them in my garage.