Jay Leno's Car Collection | Behind the Scenes

hmm and then the big hum the big hum oh you got to hear the hump yeah man so you can drive it as a modded car it's not a problem you want a driver are you kidding me [Music] next exit look what it did to his mustache he's hollywood type today i'm with comedian and lifelong car guy jay leno jay hello so glad to have you here thank you this is the operating theater here well doctor what what happened here well this is pretty much what happens uh with modern gasoline actually um you know the old days you could put uh gasoline in the car it might last a year or two years modern gas only lasts maybe three or four months so if you have an old car and you're storing it don't leave that don't even use stabilizers or something you know i run this car well i hadn't run over about a month and a half and what happened was i was driving it went fine went fine i went home a couple nights ago turned the key and at first i'd thought you know i had a drip pan and i thought oh the drip pan came up and hit the fan because it sounded like bang bang bang metal metal you know so then i realized started to crank and i realized it sounded like you know like a like a a plug was out so it yeah it had to be a valve so we pulled the head off and what happened was a uh you can see here oh yes intake valve seized in the guide you know this gas with his mb whatever it is and all this other stuff in it now it gets gummy very quickly what happens is an intake valve hung up hit the piston and smashed it into the cam and broke the cam so if you can find gas stabilizers please use them not a plugger but like stable or something like that it works pretty good because this is obviously going to be an expensive job yeah well now one of the things i mean you were you were driving this because you drive almost all your cars well not almost actually i don't know somebody almost driving like i hit the wall you mean you know you almost drove oh whoa that was up to that turn you were driving pretty good until you almost drove it well let's let's look at some of the other ones that you actually do drive not just almost dry it's prettier in here there's no broken stuff yet well jay this is a nice grouping um yeah yeah several very nice pieces here bentley that's a 1931 uh 8 liter bentley that's a big sedan uh these are great this was i think a far better car than the rolls-royce the engine this is all dead stock let's see what she is okay yeah those were huge yeah big eight liter six four valve no head no head overhead cam um monster su carburetors those aren't the hd6 those are some pretty big yeah yeah you know the reason they had no head is people always go that's well in those days head gasket technology is not sort of what it is now and cars would often blow head gaskets so you could say to a customer you'll never blow a head gasket with this and you couldn't argue that you couldn't argue with that you know when you look at a car like this you realize this comes from an era when labor was cheap and technology was expensive i mean you have literally uh come on over here you guys when you look at how many little small nuts you could pay a guy 45 cents an hour to sit there all day and twist a nut but to come up with some technology would cost you a fortune now technology doesn't cost you anything that's expensive but you've got to pay a guy 60 bucks an hour with health and welfare so it's a complete opposite that's why these cars cost so much to restore it's not that they're particularly complicated although they can be but it's an issue of time it's just an issue of of time it's just so much that it's so labor intensive i mean this is just holding a water jacket look you have now you would have maybe four or five nuts and bolts and some kind of modern high-tech bonding material to hold the plate on this is every inch spanning about four feet yeah yeah see bentley was a locomotive engineer so these are big heavy bulletproof cars that have sort of almost well they look locomotive they do when you and these were very fast i mean these are capable of over 100 miles yeah this is well over 100 mile an hour sedan and even the way the overhead cam drive works most cars have a chain or a belt this has a like conrad's like a train so it really is if you put it this way it's it's almost like a train and it runs the runs the overhead cam off off and this probably weighs 7 000 plus uh maybe not seven thousand maybe a little closer to uh the six oh so it's a little bit sick and this is you don't see much of any more this is what they call an auto vac are you familiar with these well this is what everybody does they put modern electric fuel pumps in but this is a vacuum type device and what it holds about it let's say about a quarter maybe quarter and a half half a gallon of fuel in here and as you drive there's a vacuum pump that keeps putting a couple of dollops of gasoline in this so it's really kind of a reservoir you know yeah you don't pump pump right so you have a gravity feed to the carburetors from here that's cool so there's no electric pump yeah i like that yeah now this this is a boat over here i mean is it actually it actually looks like a boat yeah this car came out of the it was in the harris collection that's what i love about bill harry he saved a lot of great cars um crane simplex crane simplex yeah holbrook built the body crane what what they tried to do there i think it was harry crane it was his name uh he tried to make an american sort of rolls royce and these were very staid conservative cars holbrook bodies big limousine bodies on them and this was was built for oh a guy that had something to do with one of the yacht clubs so he he had it done as a boat i mean you even enter it i mean it looks good it looks ocean going okay you got flip up seats here and they they pipe your board do they yeah yeah and you got well look at the dashboard the dashboard is very oh yeah nautical and even though you got a propeller in the back and now leg room not a problem no not at all not at all you could really stretch out that baby yeah she got you oh yeah a bit of whimsy oh good chair yeah it's kind of fun now this here is a duesenberg chassis and this is really what you bought when you bought a duesenberg well yeah this is this is a 1929 duesenberg chassis which runs fine it's perfectly drivable i drive it on the street that's why it has these covers on the headlamps to protect against stones from the tires being long enough but what they would do is they would build this chassis and then they'd take it out of the indianapolis track and you know drive it you know 100 miles an hour yeah and then okay when they dreamed it was fine then they would put a body on it but this is basically what you got for your eighty five hundred dollars and then you put a body on top of this when you realize ford for about eight hundred or so no no let me see yeah but no by 29 the fords were 260. oh well the last model t was 266 something like that so you know this was a lot of money this was a house right and they would send it you would send this out to any number of custom coach builders right i mean the factory bodied an awful lot of them most of them but murphy and and the baron whoever but he got twin cam four valve 265 horse when most cars yeah it really was a dual dual overhead cam 32 valve car i mean that was right that's that's way way ahead of its time yeah i mean it was ahead of its time up until the for american cars what the 80s yeah yeah now some of these were even supercharged right i've got a supercharged sj it's not here right now we just got it out and uh redoing the supercharger it even normally aspirated there was supposedly capable of about 90 in second gear 120 yeah well it's not posted there 88 in second 116 and top remember that there was an ad that used to run in uh when i was a kid for the comet a hundred thousand miles at a hundred miles an hour and then the guy would come on and said numb was the best part when i was fourteen he that they showed the comet going i think it was daytona a hundred thousand miles at a hundred miles an hour and then the big hum the big home oh you gotta hear the hum and that was a little comet with the 289 and i love those i love those ads great car great great engine oh god yeah but now this is is really a one of a kind yeah this is another one of a kind that dude duesenbergs are pretty rare to begin with but this is even a rare duesenberg this is the only one they built like this uh they did a big story for automobile quarterly on it this is a 1934 aerodynamic coupe it was built herbert newport designed it walker built it which was it was built essentially by the factory you got some cord look to it a little bit yeah it looks a little bit like a cord when you realize that that duesenberg and these duesenberg are basically the same era you realize just how aerodynamic this is i mean it's a bit i mean what's the word ergonomically it's ridiculous it's no more ergonomically ridiculous i mean when you look at these door hinges four hinges and it just sort of i mean i have these mirrors stuck on here just so i can see what you can't see out of it right i mean there's absolutely no room in it but this is this it really it really shuts like a door you have that double click yeah yeah this one here is a beverly murphy beverly sedan this is for the owner for the chauffeur driver this is for the guy who liked to be driven but also liked to drive himself and you had two dashboards front and back oh i'm sorry it's all messy in there but i didn't know you guys were coming today the radio is in there so there but everything here is registered everything air is on the road it's he's on trailer queens they get driven a lot and not a lot of people do that huh not a lot of people do that well they're fun to drive you know you really can't appreciate what it is until you drive them yeah oh and one in blue how nice this was the first usenberg ever got i think there are there were seven of these built i think they're five remain lots of what they call the baron barrel side this is a 1930 duesenberg actually you know all duesenbergs were built in 1929. it just took 10 years to sell them they did 500 and some odd chassis and they weren't they weren't actually dated until they were sold and they were sold yeah that was different i mean this whole idea of cars coming out every year they really didn't didn't do that it's like the package where the 903 then whenever they had a new series they introduced it and then there was a lot of pressure with i think it was sloan and general motors oh let's do every year and all that kind of thing you know what just sort of disappeared too i mean i was a kid i remember i was there april 17th 1964 at the ford dealership with my nose pressed against the glass waiting for the mustang and then then the salesman took the curtain down you know here's your donut here's your hot dog you know you got all that they don't do that anymore i do miss it but anyway this is i mean this is an everyday car um dual call fayetten yeah all the duesenbergs i brought to pebble beach just to get them some history so you can go you know over the years so many things get changed so many things get moved around so when you take a car to pebble the historians come and they go yeah that's correct that's correct that's correct so you got now you you know it's like a pedigreed dog right mother's lassie the father's rin okay fine so you know this puppy is gonna be okay now this was a uh what did you say this was a lebaron body the baron barrel side yeah i got this out of a barn where it's been it's been sitting since 1951 looks better now probably yeah it looked pretty good when i got it really but you know the thing about duesenberg's duesenbergs even when they weren't worth anything they were still worth more than anything else even during all the scrap drives i think 475 480 something like that i'm not the expert duesenbergs were built and 375 remain so just people knew to save them you know i mean they just it was never it was too special an old funky car i mean would even feel hospitable when junky cars were 50 these were fifteen hundred dollars yeah wow you know uh this duesenberg to me was the first old car that ever cost more than a new car you know in the old days people gave you know you could get a new cadillac for that perfect i mean when i when my dad and i would go look at old cars when i was a teenager and my dad you know buy a new cadillac for that duesenberg was the first car why would you pay more for an old car than a brand new car to me at least in my memory duesenberg that's right we'll hear how people go from right well there's an idea there you go i'm afraid to even touch it jay ah ooh feels so nice yeah well they're cozy too aren't they set your clock [Music] [Music] power steering was not one of the options armstrong armstrong power string by armstrong that's a good event it's a three-speed right yeah double clutch even on the upshift not bad takes a long time to warm up guzenberg's never ever overheat you know he was a cooling and lubrication engineer so they always ran cool it comes with an altimeter yeah why well you know when you look at what was going on in 29 you know things you sort of reflect to society you live in um i'm telling you what the equivalent will be lemberg had just flown the ocean so everybody wanted aircraft technology aircraft aircraft was in even when you look at the bugatti with the riveted body that was oh look aircraft fuselage technology uh you know i saw humphrey bogart movie the other night where he he bought a new uh 36 ford and he goes look at that dashboard strictly airplane type strictly airplane type because that's how you impress people i mean what was faster than an airplane you're flying over the ocean you're flying to different countries so you give the impression that your car you know duesenberg also had you familiar with these no what are those uh maybe it'll come on and we'll get lucky but these are lights uh one is battery chassis chassis lube oh okay so did it come on when it did when you did it that did that about everything every 80 miles and then the plunger would drop and lubricate then you got battery and then you got water now these had this was really one of the first cars if not the first with four wheel hydraulic brakes right first american car certainly first car four wheel hog and i see a brake is that the yeah i don't like pressure that gauge is a little bit off it should go to zero i've got a gate but again you're dealing with people who go at the time you know they had just convinced people to get four-wheel breaks because people think oh four you're gonna go over there you're gonna go through the windshield they're going to fly over there so always tell people look instead of a steel rod pulling a cable we're going to put a fluid in here under pressure and it's like i got something better here right yeah so you had that gauge to show me how many pounds of pressure people are very conservative it takes them a long time to try a new idea like franklin you know franklin had to put a radiator on the front of their car because it was an air cooled car but they had to put a radiator because people just weren't really thought oh the radiator is impressive the bigger the radiator the fancier the car let me we'll get her up to speed even had attack in 2029 yeah all duesenbergs had attacked you know fred do fred and auggie were race car guys yeah at bicycle racers originally right yeah [Music] they both had the middle name samuel isn't it they both had the middle name samuel i guess that's right red samuel and auggie sample yeah well samuel might have been a middle name it might have been a last name like newer ah yeah my middle name is we're caught in traffic dad stuck in traffic yeah pity it's not our problem the great thing about a duesenberg is one of the few cars you can drive as a modern car you don't have to apologize you don't have to stay in the slow lane you know and excuse me go ahead you know do all of that nonsense it's more like get out of my way i'm coming [Music] man when you realize we're ready we're going faster than any model t could you know just pull out the freeway you could take a t on the freeway not with me you won't now when did your fascination with duesenberg's actually start i mean you're a car guy i was a kid really you know this is the car that was all you know the ralph stein books and this is always the greatest american you know the mightiest motor car the albert book i mean you realize you got solid axles front back and you got a pretty good ride i mean we're doing 70. [Music] yeah man so you can drive it as a modded car it's not a problem don't have to apologize and it's really it's tracking so true there's nothing you know another bit of lost technology that all car guys sometimes forget about is they buy these big 19-inch or 21 inch tires and they get shimmy and shake and they forget to shave the tire you know you find an old boy in your town that's got a tire shaver and you can take a pound of rubber off of that thing because most of those times they're so big they're out around once you cut them then they run through yeah let's see you can go anyway we're just cruising along we're doing 70. we're only turning 3200. what a ride but being able to drive at this speed in 1929 well on the roads i mean where was there a road you could even do this right exactly i mean this has got to be heaven the car's going yes that glass the road so you could time yourself that's a stopwatch they were racers weren't they no cowl shake it's unbelievable even a mid-60s cadillac or buick though it's like that yeah i've got a study hawk gt hawk the whole front end fender's that would be a 57 huh was that 57 uh gt was 62 through 64. it was the yeah i thought i think it packard yeah the packard high that was actually 58 the one year they did that's right yeah yeah the the gt was the brook stevens body really a real pretty car to me the prettiest one was the first year the 52 commander oh gosh that i mean clean line and then they had they thought they had to go with defense and everything that was the most beautiful car i think in america i guess that was actually bob berg you know what a ferrari or pores you get the finger you know nobody gives you the finger to do it well it's just it's such elegance and such grace it's just beautiful great guy's slowing us up here [Music] [Music] [Music] corner is pretty good when you figure what it is texas is also got a fairly high center of gravity doesn't it not as bad as you might think so [Music] the chassis is the most fun you know because you're dropping almost a ton i saw one in randy's shop now my chassis that one yeah i could not believe yeah well he had to do something he had he had your studs chassis but he also had a duesenberg chassis there i couldn't believe how big it was yeah yeah but especially to take that in the freeway because you lose a ton of weight literally a ton away let's find yourself pulling up on cars all the time small one like that you couldn't even see it if you got too close over this hood the best one i don't have here that's a supercharged murphy convertible oh two-seater convertible that's the best that's the greatest car there is 320 horse oh man so bit of a flat spot it's been sitting for about a month so once they true up hard to get them warm on a day like today i'm sure there were reproduction tires the michelins are great i run mission blackwall another problem you know guys with these cheap two-ply white walls they wonder why the car runs bad and doesn't handle it but a very strong motor just all day long and and just so smooth yeah that's original mileage by the way that's total mileage would these event little are these dash you know this car was built in the 20s now by the 30s everybody else is catching up pretty quick and duesenberg did what they had to do to you know they put the disc wheels on and you know the wheel covers and you know packard had recessed lighting and synchromesh what does it mean was a great engine and a great chassis next exit it sounds like an airplane and it's a model a coupe it's an old guy driving so i'm going to this road on this road and i go e i'm just leaning on the horn he's going because he's not looking like he goes go riley go around him you know so i pull up behind him and i go hey got that be the crap all the rodeo and the guy go just like something from the 30s you know modeling being passed by a new i like to do at least 15 miles i don't like to put them another big mistake guys make in these cars short runs they run multi-grains oh versus uh straight great oil you mean yeah you gotta you can't run it like a 2050 you know people tell you oh when it heats up it gets to 50. but it doesn't heat up that's the idea behind this so you're always running 230. unless it's you know you're driving to san francisco on a 90 degree day it's never going to become a 50 weight oil you want a driver are you kidding me we'll switch up here we'll let dennis drive it's like a modern-day car are we still on tape you know the sad thing about them american car when you go to england they're still making crank cases everything for bentleys because guys drive them blow them up driving most duesenbergs just sit on the shelf the technology's forgotten all the parts are used up the guys that know how to fix them go broke because nobody breaks them i see you're doing your part though oh i break them all the time that's my job [Applause] [Music] i'm gonna need to okay pull it back there we go let me uh let me get a little bit there and where are we going you got cars coming there hey let these trucks go by okay trucks oh those trucks oh yeah look man i'm driving [Music] look out ally it's just so smooth yeah you know you read the myths the fastest well compared to modern cars compared to even a modern hatchback it's not fast it's a different kind of power power was measured differently you know you put the car in third you go down to five or six miles an hour you nail it that's how people used to measure acceleration in the old day you can't really it's like apple's an orange yeah it's just a different kind of power different rating of horsepower [Applause] but you can just it's so you can just feel how deep that power is when you're only at 2500 you can put your foot on it but once you get up around three grand it starts to breathe then the four valve head really comes into play the torque is so much higher up than a you know an old packet or like the mercer at 2200 rpm you're at the end of the world it is a hold on your hat type car yeah well the guy get used to this there's no reason an old car can't be as dependable as a new car there's really no reason at all you can even feel the craftsmanship and the engineering in this car though it just it's through the whole thing and you can turn around the next one next exit let's make a u-turn [Music] a little bit you look like a lady nothing worse it looked like it'd be a pass and a deuce jay says he doesn't like being passed in a duesenberg it looks back it up pick it up it looks bad now were there even four speed transmissions back then or was three the standard all those bugs originally came with four speeds who did they but they weren't strong enough they all broke so they went to this auburn transmission which is i believe it's auburn and randy would know a little bit but that's funny because the variation of a truck transmission the one other car of this vintage i drove a 29 boat tail speedster right offered and it shifted exactly the same way right but again you got to look at the time in those days if you wanted to buy over the car they would say to a guy how many speeds in your car four this car only needs three to do the same thing you know people didn't want to work hard in fact fred nuzenberg fred and augie were working on an automatic transmission before he died but the idea that a car could do with three once most cars needed to do four well that was a plus you get one pound oil pressure for every mile per hour these speedometer breaks look at your me you work awful hard but you got to be having fun oh i'm great for these toys oh yeah this is all i do there's a nice kind of view of people passing us how bad is that got passed by a chevy what's that all about so have you fully adapted to california oh i love it here do you can't pay me to go anywhere else okay oh yeah i love living out here [Music] oh jay beautiful that's about it not only not only riding it but driving it it's just too cool thanks man look what it did to his mustache he's hollywood type [Music] how am i cut yep i think so that's pretty much your your basic story there the duesenberg story let me go put on some steam clothes

Channel: MyClassicCarTV

Views: 185,178

Keywords: My Classic Car, Classic Car, Dennis Gage, jay lenos garage, jay leno's garage, jay leno, jay leno's car collection, Jay Leno's 1930 Duesenberg, Jay Leno's Duesenberg, 1931 Bentley, Jay Leno Bentley, Jay Leno's 1931 Bentley, Jay Leno's Crane Simplex, Crane Simplex, Jay Leno Duesenberg chassis, Jay Leno 1929 Duesenberg, 1934 Duesenberg Aerodynamic Coupe, 1930 Duesenberg LeBaron Barrelside, driving jay leno's cars, jay leno history, car history, cars, jay leno classic cars

Id: w9XMUuGQ4QA

Length: 33min 32sec (2012 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021