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It's also explicitly a D&D campaign, as confirmed by a Justin Lin interview posted some pages ago. The order in which I saw the movies was 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, and going from 5 to 1 I was floored by how low-key everything was. But it's about escalation. Dom Toretto in Furious 6 is not the same person as Dom Toretto in TF&TF because he's leveled up from like 5 to 20-something. And there are things that are necessary to the process of leveling that far. There's the continuing growth and harmony of the adventuring party/family, and the acquisition and use of magic items/cars. Cars are not just a thing you drive fast in this series (Though it's kinda hilarious how there's the additional parallel of broadening scope of items. In TF&TF, the cars are super important but they don't really do much. They drive exclusively in straight lines, often badly, because these are just +2 Cars compared to the +5 Vorpal Holy Avenger Cars we get later).

Cars are a lifeblood and a part of the character, and as someone astutely noted earlier in this thread, Letty starts to remember "who she is" when she gets behind the wheel against Dom. When you're describing your epic-level character, the artifact-level items he's attained are part of that identity. This is the correct way to play D&D, Lin claims, as opposed to Shaw's crew who are again explicitly referred to by Rome in "evil mirror party" terms. These guys are powergamers. They drive ridiculously minmaxed armored F1 cars, they've looked through a hundred splatbooks to find a little car-disabling artifact that's totally gonna be broken in this next encounter, and they've sorta forgotten to give their characters personality. Shaw just cares about the result, the winning/losing binary, and if one of the characters in his party dies it's because that character wasn't optimized enough. So whatever, roll a new one.

And then it's still confusing somehow when Epic Level Dom Toretto does a superman jump to save Letty and they land on a car which breaks their fall. "How did you know there's be a car to break our fall?" is a line that's ridiculous on purpose and ideally jolts the audience into realizing "Wait, it's probably not actually literal cars that are being talked about here". I'm pretty sure cars are not actually soft and do not actually break falls. But that doesn't matter because it's a (not-particularly-subtle, this movie is not particularly subtle) set of metaphors. You take a big ridiculous risk, as big and ridiculous as you can, to save your fellow party member, and it pays off because of the life-saving force of epic level items. The DM (Lin) is not a neckbearded gently caress, so his priorities are straight. He rejects Shaw's code (brutal, gamist, us-versus-them minmaxing) and accepts Dom's (escalation predicated on doing cooler and cooler things with your friends that you're getting closer and closer to as you play).

I think it's fairly unlikely that we're gonna get a better D&D movie than Furious 6 for a long while. I saw the film a couple week ago and it's still a little baffling just how much Lin "gets" it.