Cody Walker, the younger brother of the late Fast & Furious star, Paul Walker, is on a mission to track down and rebuild a classic car that Paul gifted him as a teen — but took away because he deemed it unsafe.
Paul — who was nearly 15 years older than Cody — died tragically in a car crash in Santa Clarita, Calif., in 2013 at age 40, when a friend was behind the wheel of the movie star’s 2005 Porsche Carrera GT.
But years before his untimely death, Paul gifted Cody a car, then said he’d fix it up because he “thought I was going to kill myself” in the classic ride, Cody said.
“It was my first car — a 1964 Chevy Nova wagon — not fancy at all, it just sounds cool,” Cody, 35, told us. “I was lucky my brother was Paul. He bought me that thing when I was 15-and-a-half. I didn’t even have my driver’s permit.”
Paul got him the car thanks to his grades at the time.
“Paul got me that car, and then he had second thoughts because it had old school brakes,” said Cody, who completed some scenes in Furious 7 for Paul after his death. “It was really old school. Drum brakes and old school suspension, and it only had a lap belt. It [did] not have a headrest, and all that safety stuff, nothing like that. Paul thought I was going to kill myself, so he took it.”
“You know it’s sad it’s actually in a million pieces,” Cody remarked of the car today.
Paul was going to fix it up for Cody, who told us, “He goes, ‘I’m going to make this thing awesome. I’m gonna make it way safe. I’m going to modernize it.’”
Cody was skeptical, telling us, “I looked at him in the face, and I said ‘no,’ and he said, ‘Why you don’t believe me?’ I said, ‘You have so many project cars. I have seen cars, I never seen them again… that’s going to happen to mine! And he said, ‘You calling me a liar?’ I said, ‘Yeah straight up! I’m not gonna see that car again,’ and it was in the process of getting work done. It just got buried with a lot of his projects.”
Cody says, “I never saw the car again.”
Then, “A few years after his passing, I got hit up by a family friend that knew where some of the parts were. It is literally completely dismantled in one million pieces. It’s [north of Los Angeles]. It really bothers me… It’s got to be done. It’s got to happen. I have to track this car down.”
Cody is co-hosting FuelFest on Feb. 24 in West Palm Beach, Fla., with Paul’s 2 Fast 2 Furious co-star Tyrese Gibson, and Krayzie Bone of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is set to perform.
The auto fest is known for events in Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Abu Dhabi, and Tokyo.
Cody and his wife, Felicia Knox, named the latest addition to their family Paul last year, in honor of the star — who was the oldest of five kids, and was also survived by his daughter, Meadow.
