Vin Diesel says he felt Paul Walker on ‘The Fate of the Furious’ set ‘every day’ as cast speeds into new trilogy

The decision to open the film in Cuba with a street race that harkens back to the 2001 original “The Fast and the Furious” stemmed from Walker’s long time suggestions to add more racing into the storylines, said Diesel. Well, that and the chance to become the first American film production to ever shoot in the island nation.

After that opening, director F. Gary Gray (“Straight Outta Compton”) has the film go from zero to 60 into the espionage territory that fans now come to expect. Diesel’s Dom has his honeymoon to Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) cut short when a nefarious hacker (Charlize Theron) forces him to betray his “family.”

That forces Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), Tej (Ludacris) and the rest of the gang to team up with last film’s big villain (Jason Statham) to stop Dom from stealing the launch codes to Russian nukes.

As if Theron wasn’t enough, the franchise is also welcome another Oscar-winning addition, Helen Mirren. This family just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

“The secret ingredient is really the cast,” said Statham, who knows a thing or two about action ensembles from ‘The Expendables’ series. “I think people have really latched on to all the characters over the years, they just want to continue following what happens in that world.”

(That family image, though, took a blow last August when Johnson posted a cryptic Instagram message calling out a male costar for being late to filming a scene. TMZ later reported that the target of the Rock’s ire was Diesel.)

But there’s no debating that the cast has been a major part of the franchise’s success — particularly because its arguably the most diverse in the genre. It’s easy to forget that a year before “The Fast and the Furious” hit theaters, the similarly themed “Gone With 60 Seconds” exited theaters as fast as its title predicted.

While that film boasted the bigger names on the marquee in Nicholas Cage and Angelina Jolie, “The Fast and the Furious” had an ethnically diverse cast that “reflected real life and the real street racing scene in Los Angeles where the film was set,” said ComScore box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

“They were ahead of the curve long before diversity became such a high-profile issue in Hollywood.”

And then of course, there’s the cars. The sheer fetishistic use of classic and sports cars has remained a constant even as the franchise shifted gears from street racing flicks to heist films.

“We literally raced and destroyed hundreds of cars on every level in this film, from vintage Corvettes to Lamborghini,” said Gray. “Some of that was painful because I’m a car guy.

“I’d ask the producers, ‘Can I drown a Lamborghini?” and they’d say, ‘Well, you know it’s going to take three Lamborghinis to do that shot?’ Well, I was like is that possible? They would think about it, crunch the numbers, give you a look and say, ‘Yes.'”

With the franchise moving forward so quickly and the high cost of destroying hundreds of cars in the name of art, all doubts about whether they should’ve continued have to be left the rearview mirror.

“The ending of ‘Furious 7 ‘was so emotionally powerful and so beautiful,” said Diesel of the visual of Walker riding into the sunset in the closing credits, “it didn’t feel right to just stop the story right there.”