1930 Duesenberg LeBaron Barrelside - Jay Leno's Garage

check my altimeter see how high above sea level i am [Music] welcome covert enthusiasts to another episode of jayden's garage pandemic edition the car featuring today 1930 duesenberg this is the lebaron barrel side uh it is a four-door car it's got the two windshields front and back very cool straight a you know every duesenberg has a story because these were the most expensive cars sold in america certainly more than a rolls royce the most powerful car sold in america up until the hemi came along in the 50s so there's a lot of legends a lot of stories these were bought by people who were somewhat extravagant i guess you could say i'll show you some of the ads that duesenberg ran back in the period they used to have one he drives a duesenberg and they saw a guy you know piling a huge sailing ship or another guy standing next to a giant fireplace in a mansion never even showed the car and it was all about power and wealth and style and they are fascinating automobiles every duesenberg as i said has a story this one has a fascinating story it was bought by a 17 year old kid named william ashton now ashton obviously came from a wealthy family and his grandfather left him seventeen thousand dollars worth of stock in the early twenties which was huge money when you figured a house was around twelve hundred dollars seventeen thousand dollars is quite a bit of money anyway the grandfather and the son were both car enthusiasts the son's father or the grandson or the grandfather's child whatever you want to call him was not anyway the grandfather and the 17 year old decided to cash in the seventeen thousand dollars worth of stock and buy seventeen-year-old william this uh duesenberg well that's what they did when they drove it home the father was furious threw them out of the house two of them just furious that they would waste this stock on a ridiculously expensive car and of course a couple months later the stock market crashed the stock was worth virtually nothing and but ashton had the car and he held on to this car until 1958 okay let's fast forward to world war ii a young gi american soldier uh he and his buddies were the first guys into berlin uh during the war near the end of the war they raided some german banks they raided the safe deposit boxes took the diamonds the gold whatever they could find and they buried these items in the chassis of a motorcycle that i have next door they sealed the bike put it back together with the diamonds inside the tube frame of the chassis left the motorcycle in germany came back to united states discharged from the army went back to germany a year or so later imported the motorcycle took out the diamonds and bought this car and a huge estate in connecticut and a whole bunch of things okay this guy bought the car from ashton in 1958 so ashton had the car what is that 29 years something like that yeah okay i'm only the fourth owner of this car anyway the gentleman who had raided the german banks and bought the car had it a short time came despondent over a woman in a relationship drove this duesenberg into the garage shut the door left the engine running and affixiated himself what happened at that point was his brother then took possession of the car but his brother would never sell the car to anyone who knew the story of his brother committing suicide duesenberg enthusiasts knew of the car would go there and you know uh hey is it for sale can i buy it sorry to hear about your brother and this guy would not sell it to them i was at a motorcycle meet in in pennsylvania i ran into the brother who now owned the car we were talking motorcycles and i said you like cars oh yeah two i got to do is about and we started talking about duesenberg and uh i was quite knowledgeable on fred and auggie dusenberg and he seemed impressive by the fact that i knew who they were and he said well i've got one that might be for sale i said i'd love to see it i went to look at it and of course it was exactly what you look for in a barn find just a worn out neglected but all their car all the sheet metal everything was there and it ran it just needed everything and we made a deal and i bought the car and i didn't learn from him until literally years later the actual story if i didn't learn from him i learned it from another duesenberg enthusiast who made the mistake of trying to buy the car in the middle 60s and said hey sorry about your brother well i pretty much closed it down it only had 39 000 miles on it when uh the brother got it in 1958 and it only had about another thousand miles maybe a little bit less than that when i got it uh here are some photos of what it looked like when i got it as you can see it was all there it still needed a lot of money and a lot of effort to get it restored but it was all there i trusted it to my good friend randy emma who is the premier duesenberg specialist in the country i mean to the point where literally has a phd went to college study this you know the whole court empire the duesenberg brothers has every document has every plan for every car i mean he he really is meticulous in his research and that's why i decided to let him restore this and any other subsequent duesenbergs that i got after that this one is still my favorite because it is the most original in the sense that the engine matches the chassis matches you know duesenbergs did a lot of engine swaps it was not unusual back in the day to swap out an engine one for another even to swap a body and a lot of people would have a summer body and a winter body they'd take it to the coach builder and swap it out this one is exactly as it left the factory this is what they call the lebaron barrel side i think there were six or 70s made this is the only one that does not have the folding down front windshield which i really miss i wish it did have it but it's not the end of the world these are 420 cubic inches four valves per cylinder a twin cam unheard of every duesenberg was built in 1928 every one of them but it took 10 years to sell them they hoped to sell 500 the first year that first year i think they produced 470 something i'm not quite sure how many uh then the depression hit and it took literally 10 years to sell them after that now even though they're all built in 1928 why is this title as a 1930 because back in the day whatever year the car was sold that was the year it was titled as for example if you bought a 1937 duesenberg it might have full wheel covers and everything out but it's still a 28 model but it didn't sell until 37 so it was titled as a 37 but it's amazing how advanced this car was for the period i mean most cars could barely go by like 60 miles an hour was at the end of the world you know i've told that story many times about my dad going slow down and going a mile a minute well a mile a minute was a really amazing speed back at the turn of the last century especially even in the teens going 100 was like going 200 was today very few vehicles could could actually hit 100 miles an hour even most motorcycles would tap out at 85 or 86 you know the brush superior ss 80. it went 80 miles an hour that was like oh my god unbelievable you know so for this thing to have 265 horsepower the most powerful engine you could get in america prior to this was the chrysler of maybe 130 horsepower and that was a flathead this had 265 and then in supercharged form it had 320 this could hit 104 miles an hour in second gear i mean it's one of the few classic cars you can drive as a regular car once i open the hood you'll see this is not a show car it was it won pebble beach in 1992 and it won a few awards i think we won our class best in class and we got most elegant and a few other things my idea with these kind of cars is you restore them to 100 points you drive them down to like five points and then you're a storm again and that's what it should be and this one gets driven fairly regularly i i love this car because you don't have to wait for anybody it accelerates hard it can still hit an honest hundred miles an hour no problem uh it's got four wheel brakes i mean it's some of it is is obviously classic or vintage but the engineering was so far ahead of his time in 1928 that oh my god it'll well this was the most powerful american engine you could get until the chrysler hemi came out in the mid-50s and that sort of displaced it but in terms of visual appeal and engineering it really is a tour de force you know you always see people build replicas of cars this one would be tough to do because the casting alone like combing went through hundreds of blocks engine blocks trying to get the casting for this and the heads the machine work that was necessary to make this do what it does is unbelievable i mean the story of duesenberg the duesenberg brothers emigrated from germany it was fred and auggie i think fred came when he was seven augie when he was five i i don't hold me to i think that's what it is they went to iowa and then they designed their own engines and neither had any formal schooling but they were brilliant engineers i mean oh my god they won indianapolis a bunch of times to this day a duesenberg is still the only car only american car ever to win the french grand prix which won back in 1921 i believe it was with with murphy i think i think that's who it was i got to double check this pandemic thing kind of affects your mind you know as you can see it's just a beautiful car 142 and a half inch wheelbase this would be the sport model this is the short wheelbase model and 142. uh the long wheelbase model was 153 and a half as i said four-door you've got the second windshield here when you put people in the back you just flip this up and then you tighten this down like like this here i'll show you how that opens uh why don't we go under the hood first now when i open the hood it is not as pristine under the hood because this is a working car and as a working car uh they do tend to leak fluids and things you know like any old person i guess uh well i'll show you what i'm talking about let me open this hood i'll turn around and set the camera well there it is as i said eight cylinders in line uh this is the carburetor here this is what they call an updraft carburetor now you'll notice it's all deteriorated here from gas dripping later cars had a downdraft carburetor which means obviously gravity would allow the gas to flow down but the ceiling on carburetors that jets wasn't as sophisticated or as good and they were afraid that if the car sat too long the float bowl would fill up with gas and the gas eventually leaked down into the cylinders so they could either hydraulic or the gas would get past the rings cars wear and dilute the gasoline so what happened when you shut off a duesenberg or any car with an updraft carburetor some of the gasoline would just instead of going down into the engine would drip down here and that's what all that deterioration there is that's some gasoline dripping down you know i read somewhere someone said the duesenberg was the first car to have a computer and the sense it is a computer what this does is you see these wires there's a series of gears and clocks this is a lubricator what happens is on the dashboard there are four lights one comes on every 1400 miles to tell you to check the water battery one comes on every 700 miles to tell you to change the oil one comes on to let you know every 80 miles this comes up come and then force itself down forcing lubrication to all the chassis points and then the fourth light to let you know to check the oil in the chassis lubricator it's really a sophisticated thing it's it's it's pretty amazing this is a mechanical fuel pump as well as an electric fuel pump down right here that's your dipstick when you want to drain the oil on somebody just flip that switch turn that handle i guess a better way to say it's not a switch and it lifts up and drains the oil out and it just drains obviously in the ground this is your oil filler right here this is your intake manifold the fan is on a concentric so you can adjust the tension on the fan steering column here obviously uh generator these are your twin cams up here distributor it's all pretty pretty straightforward a voltage regulator i mean they're just a fascinating piece of kit this whole thing it's pretty amazing the crankshaft at the end of each crankshaft i think it's 92 percent mercury something like that in the end because what that is that works as a harmonic balancer the mercury actually has weight so it goes to balancing as is how incredibly smooth these engines are they're not quiet but they are very very smooth this is all cast aluminum this uh this firewall right here there's your chassis lubricator over there i will show you that when we open the other side of the hood this is your intake manifold water flows through here i've blocked off the water manifold because it tends to eat through the aluminum so and it's california is warm enough so it's it's not a problem these are your water jackets here you know i had an incident with this car i was polishing this water jacket and my finger went right through it and i go what's that and then i took the water jacket off and so how much corrosion there was because what i would do with this thing is i would mix the coolant you know and and the uh and the water and when i was on the road and it got hot i just opened the the radiator cabinet put water in it to cool it off on the road you know obviously i threw out the what they call the ph balance whatever they call it and uh california water has a lot of minerals very corrosive so it's eating through it so that's why i use that evans waterless cooler it doesn't promote rust it's life for the car coolant and it works pretty good it works very well it's actually runs maybe 10 degrees hotter because nothing transfers heat like water but it keeps it from rusting and deteriorating so that's uh i'm certainly glad i did that all right let's uh there's a twin horns right there let's move to let's see let's go to the other side and then we'll show you the interior of the car let's open the other side of the hood and show you what i'm talking about over there all right let's open up the right side of the car and show you what we have now this is your exhaust manifold that should be apple green the same as uh the block when we did this car back got 30 years ago and randy did it you could get that enamel or that porcelain rather that porcelain finish in the apple green because environmental concerns are kind of you can't do that anymore and the original manifold crack this is a replacement one we just painted some kind of heat proof green on it doesn't quite match this engine bay is not as clean as it should because this is a working car and i use it as a car you know when i go to shows and i see no weeping anywhere i realize that's not being driven you know that's sort of the fun part that's where you really bond with the machine like this is when you drive it i like to think of these sort of cracks and leaks and it's sort of like you meet these old guys that work with their hands and their hands have that sort of weathered look to them you know it's kind of like that or maybe like a aging supermodel whose lines on her face kind of show a lot of character that that's the way i look at it so or maybe that's just an excuse for not cleaning the engine bay as well as i should but um just a wonderful car it's your oil filter here that's your water pump this is what i was talking about before this is where we put the chassis lubrication you fill this with heavy oil or well a heavy oil is what you use and it shoots it to all the chassis points the disadvantages in your garage you're gonna have four marks on the floor from where it squirts into the chassis points that's your starter right there there's your distributor once again the the intake is obviously a prettier side uh this is a rain gutter right here most people in the restore you know it's funny some reason almost every duesenberg doesn't have these because people didn't know about it they forgot about this car had it originally the idea was this would take the rain down and keep it from falling into the cylinder head where the plugs are you know so that's a nice thing about buying a car that's all there you know a lot of times you don't know what's there you know the average car has probably ten thousand pieces to it so when someone says it's ninety percent finished well that means there are a thousand parts missing that's pretty much what that means but this was all there and that was sort of the greatest thing about it i i as i said i'm only the fourth owner so it runs and drives as it should it's got the correct steering box it's got everything that came with the car this is one of the early cars that still has the mahogany running boards on it come on let me shut this hood and we'll take you around the vehicle now notice i'm not locking it just yet one annoying thing about duesenbergs is every lock has its own key i would have just had one key do everything but you keep the left side of the key for the right side you know one time i was driving this and i had a fire under the hood and well the funny part is i couldn't find the fire extinguisher because i had the fire extinguisher made and put in a leather pouch that matched the interior that way it matches the interior trouble with that is when you're panicked in a fire you can't find it even if you're looking right at it because it matches the interior so i'm going down the road i can't find the fire extinguisher i get out here okay this is red hot i can't open it because it's red hot and second of all i got keys out so i pull into a 7-eleven i run into the thing and i throw a 20 on the on the thing i give me some sodas and i grab a whole bunch of one liter bottles of 7up and other stuff i'm shaking them up squirting them in here trying to put the fire out and it worked it put the fire on it was okay it wasn't too much damage it wasn't too bad but it just then i said to myself god what did i do with my fire extinguisher i must have forgot to put oh there it is and it was right next to the seat but in that panic i had i i i just didn't see it you know which is what happens when you panic so my first rule of thumb don't panic come on i'll show you around the rest of the car here's the mahogany running board i was talking about this is the battery box this is obviously where the batteries are i'm going to take a guess and hope this is the correct key no it i took the right key all right let me see hang on see this is what you do in a fire you go like this oh is this it is it which one is it let's see okay there we go now i've got two optimas in here normally you'd have that big long six volt batteries which were quite good and quite powerful the trouble is they gave off acid and that would eat through this box and eat through the bottom of the door these optimas work fantastically well there's no fluids in them so there's no gases to leak so they work pretty well these are two six volts okay let me pull that out okay got your spare tire right here i got one on each side okay let me show you how you get in the back of this thing uh first you have to reach under here and open this comes up like that and you open this door like this you had to be kind of skinny in these these days and you can in the back seat like i haven't been back here in years and then here you have just whatever you want dust cloth rags moist towelettes put that back up like that and you seal it up bring that down bring the windshield up and you're ready to go for a ride under here you have your convertible top this hasn't been up in probably 15 years i i just don't ride it with the top up and your trunk is under here i was going to show you how the trunk works but the uh you know these zippers are a bit stuck and i've got to lubricate them so we'll do that another time obviously your exhaust pipe there and this has a cutout on the floor so you can open the exhaust to make it louder and then close it off again that was considered the hot setup back in the 20s come around here and i'll show you the gauges and the dashboard which is pretty comprehensive getting in the duesenberg that's your cut out on the floor right there all right this is advance and on the ignition this is a hand throttle meaning so if you can use it as a cruise control and take your foot off the gas you can just pull that down and hold it there and this turns on your lights and parking lights uh let's start with these four lights here this is the computer that i was talking about this one comes on that's your chassis lubricator let you know every 80 miles that will light up let you know it's going to pump lubricant to all the chassis points this one below it lights up to let you know to check the level of the or oil in the chassis lubricator this one here comes on every 700 to 750 miles to tell you to change the oil imagine change the oils our lives 700 miles and this one comes down every 1400 miles to tell you uh to check the water in the battery okay uh this is fascinating duesenberg was really the first american car to have hydraulic brakes and this is a primitive anti-lock system see it says dry rain snow ice now what it does is you know or the hydraulic brake system when you press the brake of course pushing fluid through a line okay when you adjust this what you're doing here is you're you're changing the size of the holes that the fluid is going through if you make them really small then you need a lot of pressure on the brake meaning you can't lock up the brakes so if you're on icy roads you limit the size of the hole so you have to press really hard you can't lock up the brake and you'll slow down and as i said snow rain dry and that's the way that works this is the ammeter this is your ignition this is your brake pressure now see i'm applying 400 450 pounds of pressure because people that was an amazing thing to people hydraulic brakes they didn't trust it fluid in a line want to break what's wrong with a steel cable i've used that phrase of henry ford's the safety of steel from pedal to wheel but you get a lot more pressure obviously this gauge sticks a little bit it's supposed to go to zero this is your tachometer right here this is your fuel gauge this is your speedometer with a tripometer this is interesting this clock uh this is really a precision instrument uh you you can use it as a stop watch you know when you get when you get a hellcat or something now it's got all the stop watches and all those features in it that's what this does that's what this does this is your oil pressure this is a fascinating gauge here this is an altimeter lindbergh had just flown the ocean this car was built in 1928 and everybody wanted aircraft technology because that was that was the future you know getting aircraft technology in your car and this is a huge selling point you know dad would commit his 12 year old son or something but look a little billy that's an altimeter just like charles lindbergh had in his place wow you know so that's really what you don't really need an altimeter car unless you're climbing the mountains but even then there's nothing to do about it but anyway it's just a cool feature to have you know and like i said before when when you get uh a hellcat or a lot of these cars now or a nissan gtr i mean they got differential temperature i mean every kind of g-force whatever things you don't really need or use but they're just cool to have and that was one of them having an altimeter let's show you the tool kit oh pretty comprehensive these are the tools you got when you got a duesenberg got your water pump right this is an interesting tool this is unique to duesenberg the top of the overhead cam covers those knurled knobs this fits right over there and this tightens those down when you change a wheel you need this uh these are interesting wheels the way they work is you put this on you fit this in the center when you pull this see how this retracts it pulls back the locking mechanism so then you can i've got tape around here to keep from scratching the chrome let me show you how it fits on the wheel and see what i'm talking about never drive a dozer without this tool because if you get a flat you're never going to change the tire there's no way you can do it without this tool you see this here see these teeth okay you put this over there you pull that back you fit that over of course you have to get that on there remember how this is flush okay when you when you put this in then you pull that back you see how it pulls out the locking mechanism now you're free to loosen this nut and turn the wheel to tighten it or loosen it as you would then when you're done put that back pop it off and it locks in place so the wheel cannot come loose it's a pretty clever design uh but you've got if you don't have this tool you're screwed if you can read all this you got better eyes than i do as you can see it says left side once again you see that little ridge you put this on you slide it in okay and then you lock it on by pulling that out there you go now you're free to loosen the wheel and when you're done it snaps back into place okay uh i i assume a lot of you have seen the top of the duesenberg maybe you haven't seen underneath so that's why we have it on our sterile coney list here i've got my iphone so i am not a photographer obviously there's our 25 gallon gas tank your massively overbuilt rear end we put 355s in it so you get a little more cruising range look at the size of those leaf springs obviously on both sides your hydraulic brakes notice you got a torque tube that means it's like a drive shaft inside a tube there's your muffler right up here see this lever this is on the floor by the driver you pull this this opens and closes the uh the cutout for the exhaust they usually stick they don't really work that well the massive chassis there's your fuel pump there electric fuel pump see here it is this is the mechanism for opening and closing the cut out there's your emergency brake transmission there's a transmission right there look at the size of that sump see it's ribbed for cooling that's that's 12 quarts in there for your oil let me get underneath here okay massive radiator as you see very truck-like and not very clean because this car gets driven a lot you've got a screen in here you can drop that whole thing remember before i talk about that lever on on the engine where you can drain the oil well you when you pull that it opens this door right here and that's how you drain your oil you don't have to take a a a nut out i mean a screw you know you don't you don't bolt anything you just turn that you don't have to take a take a drain plug out massive springs in front there you're kind of not really shock absorbers so much as dampers nice thing is this car has never been damaged never been in an accident always been well maintained although i mean obviously it deteriorated quite a bit from 1930 when william ashton got it until he sold it in 58 nothing has ever really been done to it as you saw in the pictures i showed you before from randy emma um the car was december disassembled down to the last nut and bolt every single piece was taken off cleaned plated re-threaded whatever needed to be done and that's basically it right there so i just thought you'd get a cookie get a kick out of seeing the bottom of a massive brake drums this thing actually starts pretty good you can lock up all four wheels which is not something you can do with a lot of cars in this period that's that emergency brake as i mentioned and that's uh that's even the original muffler so that's impressive i think it's time we took this thing for a ride come on let's do it this is a car we kept completely stock and a lot of times when you find old duesenbergs they've just been beaten to death you know they the blocks have had to be re-sleeved or bored or whatever it might be we're not doing it the only thing that we did to this we added stronger connecting rods we put gorilla rods in it because the drill rods i think i think that's how you said it original they were they weren't that strong it still has 5.2 compression which is plenty runs on regular fuel but just a wonderful driving car it's hard to realize that this was just about the most powerful car in the world when it came out i mean this would be like buying bugatti veyron or sharon or one of those cars today you know 265 horsepower with double what anybody even had close to i mean the cadillac v16 that came out in 32 that was uh that was only 180 horsepower i believe people give you the thumbs up in this car all the time [Music] the nice thing is you can drive it like you have to drive it like an antique car you keep your foot in it all day long if you want it just pulls so strong check my altimeter see how high about sea level i am i don't know why i need that i mean i would drive this to car shows in santa barbara or wherever you know an hour and a half on the freeway in this thing is nothing especially with 355 gears in it then it's just loafing you're barely turning 1800 rpm you know fred and auggie nuzenberg but race car engineers that's what they did so their cars don't overheat i've never had this off to the side of the road just shooting water all over the place in steam never happened what happened with the duesenberg brothers was they started to rebuild their own car they first built their own car the model a about 1920 1921 in fact a man named castle in uh hawaii bought the very first duesenberg i tried to get that one but i couldn't the car was just restored by bruce canepa he did a beautiful job at one of those uh one of those million-dollar restaurant oh my god i don't know what it costs to do but it was just unbelievable and it was the very first duesenberg and i think it was just donated to a museum it was still in the original family they were uh from hawaii i think they were pineapple farmers something like that but they owned the very first one and the first duesenbergs were not particularly stylish they were not stylish guys the duesenberg they were engineers they were chassis suspension cooling high performance style was not what they did so their cars were a bit frumpy looking and they probably only sold about 500 cars in the four or five years they were around and then in 26 27 uh el cord came along he he was a hot shot industrialist made a name for himself selling auburns and other cars and uh he told the duesenberg but he knew of their reputation he said forget building these i want you to build the fastest most powerful american car ever made in fact i got the very last duesenberg built by the duesenberg brothers before they uh built the j it's all original car we pulled this out of a barn here in burbank but that's another story you know it's funny engineers have always known the power and efficiency of overhead cams and four valves per cylinder and hemi heads it just the metallurgy wasn't there the machining wasn't there to incorporate it into a lot of cars it was a very expensive proposition to do i mean a duesenberg chassis was 8 500 just the chassis by the time you put a body on it you're probably in the 15 or 16 000 range so i mean it would be like a bugatti veyron today or a mclaren f1 or any one of those cars i know a lot of you in the comment section will be happy to realize that i managed to incorporate the f1 into this segment as well i always like to mention the f1 because it's the greatest car ever built so there you go and i'll read the comments i knew lena would somehow get that f1 thing in there there you go but you know you put your foot in this it does make you forget about the f1 not for very long but for long enough to enjoy it it's funny how they used to define power back in the day like when these cars were built there was no zero to sixty nobody even used that as a time the idea was to slow the car down as much as you could in top gear and then put your foot in it and see if it could pull away without snatching or lugging or anything like that and this could do it easy also this was yo this is a three speed when most cars performance cars especially in europe we're four speeds it's funny in the book it says duesenberg exactly to get quite good mileage you said you can get between 11 and 13 miles per gallon yeah yeah oh well that's unbelievable isn't it because back in the day that was pretty good for this much horsepower see most old cars you're just stuck behind a truck this thing just put your foot in and you pull around and you know they steer very nicely for a heavy car this is probably 53 to 5500 pounds it steers very well especially on the move i mean it's a little tricky parallel parallel parking but once you're on the road oh boy it handles very nice i'm turning 2500 rpm at 70 miles an hour it shows you how much more there is to go dunes and burbs are more for the hollywood crowd these weren't quiet like a packard you know they weren't silent like a rolls royce or a fearless these were for people who wanted to be seen who enjoyed being seen extroverts i guess you call them there's a wonderful book by a guy named albert called the mightiest motor car it's about the dueserburg it's all letters from owners who bought them in period who bought them new the book was published in 51 so that's when this car was really still the fastest thing around there was nothing close to it it is 85 degrees fahrenheit here today in los angeles i'm looking at 165 degrees on my uh temperature gauge so that's pretty amazing the chassis on this thing is massive because people really weren't quite sure the tensile strength of metal so they build it as heavy and as strong as it could possibly be that's why these chassis do last forever you know after we did the restoration on this i invited the old boy out that i got the car from you know the one whose brother had died and we had one pebble beach and all kinds of stuff and we took it for i took him for a ride you know and i said well man look at this the brakes stopped really well and he quite seriously said well you know i flushed him in 62 and i put new fluid in oh well that's probably why yeah it's hard to convey the impact this car had on the public you know just the term it's a doozy referring to a duesenberg although i've heard people say oh it's a term from broadway it could mean something else but i think everyone used it in relationship to the car say hello she's a doozy it's a doozy meaning something was just you know unbelievably good you know i've driven a lot of cars in the spirit i saw this machine that was a straight aid that was 160 horsepower that was the most powerful engine up to its point uh you know silver goes all kinds of stuff to me nothing compares to this even ssk mercedes feels very truck-like compared to a newsenburg again four battles emmy head twin cam seven leader unbelievable you know i feel sorry for future generations because there there are no undiscovered guzenbergs out there i always get this call hey muslin we found the student now everyone is accounted for uh i think there are still 375 some some amazing uh low attrition rate that are out there people always knew they were special some got crushed for the war effort but for the most part they all remain in fact that duesenberg town car i got was the last original owner duesenberg i am only the second owner of that one and i found that in the parking garage in new york city it's an amazing story and well well if you watch that episode you can hear about it but like i said this car is this engine has never really been messed with taken apart cleaned everything checked and put back together again we just added we just did the new rods they're called the supercharged rods but we put carillo's in just to give it a little extra strength i said before i want to thank randy emma for doing just a wonderful job restoring this car you know god that was over 30 years ago we did this car and you know he's a real historian he loves the car he loves the era he's got every document every paper i mean it's really amazing that there are people like that who cherish not just the automobiles but the history and the story so randy thank you very much and uh we've got a few more duesenbergs we'll do on this i think if you like duesenberg you saw the chassis we did the duesenberg chassis uh and i've got a couple you haven't seen so uh and we'll get to those in the weeks ahead so again uh when we're done coronarizing we'll have our crew back but for now we'll just keep pandemic along so see you guys later [Music] uh

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 2,863,719

Keywords: Jay, Lenos, Garage, Duesenberg, LeBaron, barrelside, American cars, Duesy, diamond theft, Randy Ema, Fred and Augie, straight 8, luxury, bespoke, The Great Gatsby, Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, Duesenberg LeBaron, 1930 Duesenberg LeBaron, Duesenberg unique backstory, Duesenberg backstory, JL Garage, JLG, diamonds, Vintage car, jay leno vintage cars, leno

Id: fjBRkuIUplA

Length: 44min 30sec (2670 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Clareth_GIF]

I love all of that vintage Duesenberg advertising. I had no clue fire places could even get that big. I also love how Jay brings up the Nissan GTR and talks about how this car was a tech-fest way before the gtr. What a knowledge of cars Jay possesses.

[u/psaux_grep]

Definitely worth a watch. Lots of interesting things. Even has a “driving computer”

[u/[deleted]]

God jay Leno is a national treasure

[u/mifitso]

yeah this is a great video.

this duesenberg is one of a kind for sure. its almost hard to put yourself into the moment of when this car was produced.

what a ridiculously cool car.