1966 Oldsmobile 442 - Jay Leno's Garage

but watch this thing pick up when you when those three two barrels kick in not bad that's third gear it's a good car very cool welcome to the episode of jaylon's garage pandemic edition once again doing this the old-fashioned way but i'm used to it and i hope you like it i know you like the car today it's a 1966 oldsmobile 442 with a proper four-speed gearbox this is not my car this belongs to the ardrain auto museum in newport rhode island the owner nick sent it out to me we did a little bit of work on it it's a perfect car just needed a few things you know mirrors are loose coming off and radio didn't work and the only thing left to do we've got to redo the dash whoever recovered it it didn't quite fit it got bunched up in the corners and so we just have to fix that but this is a rare car this has uh you know originally 442 was four barrel four-speed dual exhaust this one has uh three two barrels on it and it actually had more power than the equivalent gto this is 360 horsepower it has the 400 cubic inch engine i thought it was a 401 maybe a mistake and i when i was a kid i had a 65 buick grand sport i loved that thing that was a four speed and that was a 401 i think this is the same motor but i can't remember so i don't know a whole lot about this car it just kind of showed up here and we've been dabbing with it and fixing it and driving it also builds a bit different than uh gto this is more of a luxury fast car in the sense it's got power steering power brakes and air conditioning you know most of the high performance stuff in the 60s especially chrysler with the hemis no power brake no power steering you just wanted you know just pure horsepower but this would be the equivalent and this might be a stretch of like a bentley con lung continental american version big luxurious car big comfortable seats but a four-speed gearbox the handling suspension the handling package three two barrels i mean when you open up those secondaries and you put it to the floor boy this thing really takes off it's a lot of fun to drive you know it's funny i don't know whether it's fun to drive because it's fun to drive or it's fun to drive because it reminds me of high school and this was just made of unobtainium the idea that i had actually get to drive one of these when i was 16 years old just seemed ridiculous you know and this was a mid-sized car which solid makes me laugh it just seems huge compared to cars you see now well not suvs but you know just smaller european compacts and things whoever did it did a beautiful restoration paint bumpers chrome everything is immaculate uh you know what happens a lot of times when people do restorations they just forget the details we had to redo get the horn to work properly as i said these were kind of loose not falling off but just you know when you go down the road it would it would move as a matter there's a like a wire piece in here you pop that out it holds the glass and you tightened it down but the transmission the clutch everything is fantastic it's got a big vacuum gauge rather than attack i've got a tack in a box i haven't put the tac on because it sort of straps to the steering column that seems kind of mickey mouse so this is the kind of car you just sort of shift by here you know just by listening if you it sounds like the vowels are going to float let me shift now and and you know big comfortable seats not these buttock crunching you know requires you get now you sit like this this thing is a real comfortable cruiser it really is fun to drive i like this thing disc brakes up front and of course drums in the back it is completely 100 stock am radio just as it left the factory but it whoever did the restoration spent some money and it's a car that's sort of been loved you may have seen it it was on bring a trailer a while back it might still be up there if you want to go and look at some of the specifics of it yeah we're going to keep it here for a few weeks and then send it back to the museum in rhode island they've got some great muscle cars at that museum i'm just a sucker for this era you know to me 66 was my favorite year my second favorite year my first favorite was 1932 and because of the v16 cadillacs and v12 packards came back and it was about performance and luxury and you know it was the midst of the great depression so they wanted to cheer people up and make them feel good and show them stuff they could never afford to have but you know 16 cylinder cadillac oh my god you know all that kind of stuff uh in 1966 because 1966 was the last year of before the federal regulators come in and go now the bumper's got to be this high now you got a mission control no you got this you know you got that so this was the the last year of sort of pure design when you look at a car like the lamborghini mirror you realize you could never you could never build that car today it wouldn't even allow it because it's it's just not uh there's no bumpers on it there's no crash but there's no nothing but it's just pure design that's why it works whenever they try to do a new modern version of a miura it doesn't quite work because it looks safer than it should be you know i mean the mural was sort of scary dangerous and cool and sexy and all that kind of stuff anyway this is the car let's open the hood let's show you let me show you the three two barrels take a look here here we go uh that's pretty cool the three two barrels i'm not sure about that master cylinder i think they had i think 66 was the first year that dual braking systems were mandated i think that's original but i'm not sure but i'm pretty sure it is big frigidaire air conditioner right here got your alt and alternator right there power steering pump so it's got a lot of luxury features at rob horsepower but with 360 which was pretty big in the gm it might have been you know i'm trying to think of anything in 66 that had well you had the 396. yeah that came out in 66. yeah chevy had the 396. that was 375. so yeah that was that was pretty good but this thing is uh i just think it's cool this is factory and the oldsmobile engineers really went out of their way to sort of make it uh oh i remember the ads back in the day you know iron fist and a velvet glove you know those kind of crazy analogies uh as you can see we put our optima battery in there because those are the best uh yeah very cool so a well done restoration got a ton of paperwork on this car got everything that goes with it let me show you there's an owner's manual there let's just but you have every bill this car cost 37.95 almost 4 000 back in the day oh no no here's the suggested retail price four thousand three hundred and two dollars uh but he's got everything here you know certificate of title i don't want to give the owner's original real name here that's no i don't want to do that let's see but i'll give you some idea i've got three books of these so it's got everything going all the way back to the first day because you know you have a car if you can't prove it's what you say it is well you're not going to get a good price for it and the car shows a lot of times you know the number of people but hey osriel never made a try power yeah dude says right here came with it and it's got factory instructions on how to tune it see there you go the old real service training guy tricarb adjustments it's all right here so there union and union you know when you bought a gto it was a dealer installed item you came with a four barrel and they put this tri-power set up in the trunk and then the dealer would i guess put it on afterwards because gm had an edict about having horsepower and all kinds of stuff let's see i think this car sold at barrett-jackson way back in 2006 if i'm not mistaken and of course the guy got a massive trunk come on i'll show you that see there's a spare dash there this is how you pull the dash out you got to pull the whole thing out to recover it this one is covered nicely but the gauges have been all screwed up but 442 tack it's in there i may put that on i don't know i don't know don't really need it it's got your jack instructions here's something kind of cool you know i don't remember the 442 coming in these colors red orange and then sort of a yellowish color i don't know if that's factory or not i guess it must be but it you know it has that sort of peter max sort of colors to it and it goes well with the black and as you can see hurst equipped uh the w30 came after this that was the air ram air package don't forget this is 66 this is early i like the kind of flying buttress deal here it's very nice to drive you know it's you're driving a luxury car and it shifts boy the transmission is just beautiful shifts wonderfully but let's take it next door we'll put it up on the left and we'll show you what it looks like underneath okay we got the 66 ultimate 442 up on the uh sterile coney lifts okay it looks like a new gas tank or at least relatively new exhaust system looks relatively new um looks like she's been driven not abused doesn't be any repair damage to the chassis the drum brakes in the back aftermarket shocks that's all right it's fine coils i don't know what four speed is this a muncie four speed it's it's it's gm i don't know if chevy and olson blc she had the same transmission uh there's your emergency brake right there your pipes 400 cubic inch v8 i don't know if this is the same 401 that was in my 65 grand sport but that was sold the 401 i know the 400 is a different motor yeah let's see this car just came in so i don't know a whole lot about it uh we did a little bit of work to it not a whole lot as i said just fix the horn the rear view mirrors the uh got the radio working again so funny you know guys always forget to hook up the horn for some reason they're so excited about the restoration you just take it for granted and then you're asking no i got to pull the whole thing out to do the horn so a lot of times they don't but uh it makes me laugh and even nice and clean here look no no it doesn't look like any frame rails have been straightened or anything like that disc brakes in the front of course it is a442 grease on all the fittings so it's not a show car it's a car that gets you and it drives wonderfully i haven't had a whole lot of experience with it i just took it out the other day for a little run and i was so impressed it was so comfortable oh my god that's a nice car [Music] here we go [Music] nicely done all right i think that's probably a 323 rear end if i'm not mistaken that's what it feels like but i'm not sure anyway let's uh take it for a spin and uh you'll find out when i do it's amazing how quickly things change it wasn't that long ago the oldsmobile cutlass was the number one selling car in america and then boom then they're out of business you know you know you're only as good as your last car that's pretty much the way it worked you're like comedian you're always funny as your last joke and that's over see it picks up nicely when those secondaries kicked in so funny having only four speeds you know i get stuff with seven speeds eight speeds 10 speed automatics back when this car came out most cars had a three speed then you paid optional for the whoo four speed that was a big deal but it's very comfortable it shifts nicely i like this because you don't see many 442s everybody does the goats the gtos and all that stuff and corvettes and everything but 442 just seems to have fallen by especially this in this body style this 66. i'm trying to win i think 64 was when uh the 442 first came out is like an option nothing in the interior let you know it's a fourth two except the four foot two emblem there of course but there's no sport steering wheel or anything like that all these seats are very comfortable a lot of torque this motor it feels like it might be close to 500 pounds if possible something like that i think 66 is a good year for oldsmobile that's how they come out with the first generation toronto you know the one i converted mine to rear wheel drive but it was front wheel drive 375 horsepower wonderful car i thought it was just the greatest looking thing because it looked like an american car you know it's the kind of car you could let them go that's only be met couldn't be german couldn't be japanese too big that's got to be an american car yeah she leaps i used to love reading the english magazines back in the day when they would jump from like a morris miner to something like this and this would be an american sports car they're gonna rip it apart an horrible thing but they all wanted them they all wanted the comfortable value for money uh you couldn't beat them because when this thing came out gasoline was about 24 to 28 cents a gallon and england gas was always expensive the other thing left to do is uh repair the dashboard where it's uh coming apart here a little bit that'll be easy actually no well nothing's easy in modern cars it's impossible but this this isn't too bad luckily we got that spare dashboard in the trunk so we can uh use that to figure out where the where the points are as i said this thing had more power than the gto or just about anything else in the in the gm lineup i don't know the chevelle at 396. what was that was that three and a quarter horse am i right i don't know tell me in the comment section you'll let me know but watch this thing pick up when you when those three two barrels kick in not bad that's third gear this is a car i could drive to vegas drive to san francisco very comfortable let's put new tires on it yesterday those you got to have the red lines they make the whole car those i wish they'd bring back the redline tires they always look great i don't know why they did away with them i don't know yeah always makes me smile i mean if you were starting a 4-4-2 you couldn't do much better than this one you know just for all originality i mean everything seems to be exactly as it was not a lot of goofball stuff on here and it's got to be a brand new windshield i mean there's not a nick in it it's just beautiful it's like i had my eyes you know cleaned or something it's fantastic can you get your eyes cleaned i don't think you can but anyway i enjoyed doing these videos i'm i'm glad folks appreciate them i enjoy hearing in the comments section if you like them and uh you know with the pandemic as i said is a little tricky but it's fun it's what i like to do and we keep it going and it's fun to show people who don't remember caution this ever what they were like and show them underneath and show them going down the road so i'm dropping the third gear open the other four barrels it's a good car very quick anyway this is kind of a smash and grab one you know this car came in and they wanted us to go through it a little bit and check it out and i thought hey let's shoot it for the website i think people get a kick out of seeing it because you just don't see this body style 442 anymore you all see the later ones 68 and on 67. so this is uh this i think was kind of cool so anyway thanks for watching and uh i think we got something interesting next week too you'll enjoy that so thanks you guys see you later remember four-barrel four-speed dual exhaust that's what 442 stands for see you later [Music] uh

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 545,976

Rating: 4.9628358 out of 5

Keywords: Jay, Lenos, Garage, Oldsmobile, 442, American cars, muscle cars, gearhead, car porn, Audrain Automobile Museum, V8, 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, 1966 Oldsmobile, jay lenos garage motorcycle, 1966 oldsmobile 442, muscle car for sale, muscle cars JLG, muscle cars sound, restored Oldsmobile, oldsmobile jay leno, oldsmobile toronado jay leno, oldsmobile 442

Id: tBXH5y3YNOo

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Cyrix2k]

Very nice, I always enjoy the 442s.

[u/rm2601]

Beautiful machine! Oldsmobile, Pontiac, SAAB, & Saturn. Each of these brands were so cool in their own ways. With Oldsmobile being innovative, SAAB also being innovative and sturdy, Pontiac putting out some serious excitement with performance, and Saturn going after the Japanese. Just to think where these brands could be right now in the right hands.

[u/hifidood]

Those six pack carb setups are something else.

[u/Funkytadualexhaust]

4 barrel, 4 speed, 2 exhaust.. But its 3 two barrel carbs?

[u/Brokenback2014]

Love the car, that was a great year too.

[u/KlueBat]

I don't really know much about cars from that era, they simply were not around when I was growing up, but dang are they beautiful. It makes me so happy that Jay and these other museums are committed to preserving them.