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McQueen loved driving, in the words of Harvey Keitel’s The Wolf, “real f***ing fast.” He was a skilled off-road motorcycle racer, and famously showed off his riding expertise in “The Great Escape” (though it was his stunt double Bud Ekins who performed the legendary jump over the barbed-wire barrier). He was equally adept behind the wheel of a car, falling 21.1 seconds short (in a Porsche 908/02) of Mario Andretti (pushing a Ferrari 512S) in the 1970 House of Sebring endurance race.
McQueen fully understood the thrill of piloting a souped-up car around tight corners while navigating steep city streets. If you take an incline at a high rate of speed in a Ford Mustang GT Fastback, you will catch an abundance of air. As the star told Pat Hustis, who built the fleet camera car used in the “Bullitt” chase, “”I want the audience to know what it’s like to do this.”
As to who initially conceived of the chase, it all depends on who’s telling the story. Screenwriter Alan R. Trustman, who’d previously worked with McQueen on “The Thomas Crown Affair,” told Motor Trend he was inspired by his own vehicular experimentation.
“‘I told them that, if you drive a light car like a Ford Mustang downhill fast it will take off at the intersections and fly through the air.’ Trustman says he tried the stunt himself during a 1954 summer break from Harvard law school, launching a new Ford Fairlane off the streets.”
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