Nethercutt Collection: 1923 Hispano Suiza

suppose like your Rolls-Royce from the same era would be about 15 to $23,000 new so this was at the $115,000 Mark so it was right there as a close competitor but yeah yeah I still think the engineering on the his the hos are better oh yeah I think so Rolls-Royce wasn't Rolls-Royce it was still making its name you know right yeah I think hispanos sua walked so Rolls-Royce could run yeah now there was no synchromesh no zero syn you're still about 7 8 years away from synchr mesh but shifts very nicely when she wants to run you can feel it when this car came out the speed limit was like 35 M hour welcome to episode of Jon's garage once again being visited by royalty from The nethercut Collection this is the 19 23 Hispano sua h6b this is a car I've lusted after for a long time not this particular body style but uh the the two-door model that was like uh kind of looked like a better looking 32 forward I guess you'd say uh a little Coupe light fast just an amazing engine Mark Burkett was the designer of these cars and he was just a brilliant engineer held a lot of patents he's the guy that Ena front wheel brakes to go on cars because in those days you had cable brakes he invented the series of levers and arms that would allow you to turn the wheel without pulling see the reason a lot of cars didn't have brakes in the front you turn the wheel and the rod would pull the brake so you you you wind up jamming the brake on them not on the wheel that you were turning uh he he made that a device which allowed it to rotate around us just brilliant just a brilliant engineer uh he was Swiss hispanos swis means Spain and uh Switzerland this was right up there with the Rolls-Royce the Pierce Arrow any of those cars this was Europe's finest and I think one of the prettiest it's a six-cylinder but it's big it's 400 cubic inch 6 I believe and uh quite powerful you could go 75 miles hour in this thing all day long they were just just amazingly beautiful delicate automobiles when you see the dashboard you see the uh the instrumentation it's one of the prettiest dashboards I've ever seen you got flash pans inside the engine compartment to keep dirt and water from coming up and kind of being thrown on the engine but let's meet Cameron from the museum Cameron how you been my friend great Jay thanks for having me back good good to see you good to see you uh boy this is a beauty one of my personal favorites yeah yeah uh how did it drive over here okay pretty good she's it's actually been a while since she's been out so she's still finding her fluid levels right and peeing a little bit of uh coolant but like you said splash guards nothing on the engine bay at all yeah still clean under there let's show them that engine bay let's take a look here this is pretty amazing and these screws make everything a lot easier too yeah rather than the the clumsy pull-up ones well as you can see I mean look at that this is your water pump right here there's your oil level right there your oil goes in here no but the reader works great this is real mechanical art you know it really is just a pretty pretty motor I think it has the prettiest engine Bays of the era even over Rolls-Royce and and dusenberg honestly and look at look at the belt it's not a it's not a continuous belt where you slide it over you I mean you have to unhook the belt and then clip it together to put it in there I think as I remember little tricky and you got your dual distributor caps as well um those pop off nice and easy boy that's really nice isn't it we have two spark plugs for cylinder is that what we have here on this yes yeah yeah there so the other are on the other side right right right I mean inline sixes are just they make a lot of sense well inline sixes were always the smoothest oh definitely yeah lowend torque 120 horsepower which is quite quite fast for the day and it's a pretty light car it's not as heavy as it seems is it no so the the chassis without the tires and no fluids they weighed a little bit over 2600 lb that's nothing no for and and this is all technology from from 1919 when the H6 came out up until 1933 you could feel the difference in advancements in engineering with the J12 but this is the one that where they really earned their medal this one here absolutely it was uh fast quiet oh we put that down I want to break your arm yeah Mark Burkett was a very very intelligent man very ahead of his time there we go and again south check body yes so this is a completely transformable body patented by souch amongst a lot of other patents that transable means the roof comes off yes so this is called a Cabriolet DeVille right the roof will come off and uh fold backwards gotcha we like to leave it on the the tan interior we call this paint rust right it's like a caramel is red brown but her nickname's rust and the tan complements it very well you'll see the windows right here they're oh look at that yeah little loose little loose yeah but by Design and how do those come oh oh see they so there is a window lock actually on the door it might be engaged oh I see there's no uh there's no crank you just push oh here here's the crank we go here we I see there you are so the ergonomics are terrible but the the Design's beautiful yeah it really is I see I see how they're working in you yeah cuz they're a little wobbly good enough for now good enough for now okay yeah good looking car and of course four-wheel brakes which not many people had 1919 no that was the big thing that b burket did was the four-wheel uh servos assisted drums and the brakes actually are very good stopping the hard part about these brakes is when you're actually at a stop oh yeah keep them hold but you could feel it in your feet well it's a power brake but it uses a vacuum but it it's got as Henry vo used to say the safety of Steel from pedal to wheel you have a little tube copper tube with fluid in oh that's too dangerous you know so you had that so that was kind of cool uh just the prettiest dashboard ever you know the all the instrumentation is so dainty and what is that is that an oiler on the floor there so those are actually the fuses oh oh fuses of course yeah okay very nice and then your exhaust valve is right to the left that which is nice cuz you can actually operate it with your foot but while you're driving the driver's seat and passer seat's pretty tight up there considering how big the car actually is right right and of course you have that famous emblem oh yeah that was named for a French flyer gimr or G something like that uh he was a a hero of World War I and uh that stor was meant to honor him and his service to uh the French during the war and it's a just a great looking it's yeah it really is very pretty mascot and of course you have a stone guard in the front this is to keep rocks from damaging your radiator from being thrown up by a vehicle in front of you they still managed to make everything look pretty back then yeah beautiful headlights and this is quite an expensive car in the day wasn't it yeah so brand new price back in 1923 was $115,000 we actually just recently found a photo of it in a showroom in France in 23 this actual car huh this actual car cuz we are unsure how many souchi bodies they made for the H6 there was a 2,158 h6s in total built between the regular 6 6B and 6c so they made quite a bit from 1919 to 1933 well it's a very successful design I mean I drove them on like 40 years ago and it's really impressed it's just just unbelievably smooth but everything just kind of Clicks in the P you know oh it's just just great well two to three you don't need a double clutch but it sometimes if you catch it right it'll just pop right in by itself you barely you could just tap the stick let's see the other side of the hood and see what it's like under there yeah that's the pretty side well look at that look at that intake manifold and this is your Advan and for your Magneto uh this steering box horn intake manifold here updraft carburetor we which was fairly common back day you had an updraft because if you had a downdraft carburetor they still hadn't perfected needles and seats and all that so if you had an updraft car would would sit with the needle light but gas would slip past it get into the cylinder and then when you turned it you'd hydraulic the cylinder you could blow the cylinder head so and this carburetor isn't exactly the one you want to keep testing it's it's kind of difficult to uh get into it and tamper with and what is this here I wonder not sure what that is I don't know but as you can see a vacum beautiful water plates say the Spano sus on it I love how they kept the dash too even though it's separated by the carburetor yeah yeah all right we shut that down so she's a best of show or excuse me not best of show best-in-class winner at Pebble Beach right 1993 and I'm very happy that we're doing this episode together because this car honestly has only seen a of day a few more times since '93 she's one of the ones that stay in the Grand salon quite a bit so I'm very happy to get her out in the road this is been this week's my first time ever driving it it's always been a favorite of mine well let's uh let's drive it and see how it goes let's do it okay first go to battery these are fuel pumps yeah put it one more up one more up and then press the starter right here here this one here yep there we go you know it's funny sometimes people get in these old cars they go why is it three-speed instead of four-speed well actually back in the day three-speed was more desirable that means you had a torquey engine and you had one less shift you had to do to go down the road so people actually thought three-speed was better than four-speed yeah the less Shifting the nicer the car you had basically I know dusenberg is it true that in the beginning they were four speeds but every dusenberg left the factory with a four speed and they'd blow them up they couldn't take the torque they all broke and they pulled them all back and replaced them I believe with a white truck 3pe yeah and three is really all you need for this car I mean like you said it'll probably do about 60 70 M hour right and Mark Burkett his main goal for the design of the H6 was dependability speed elegance and and style and I think think he achieved all that in this thing not bad for I can't remember if Nikolai teslaa had a Hispano I I wouldn't thought maybe he did but I wasn't sure there was somebody used to drive one on the Long Island Expressway when it was built in like 22 okay and he used to go 70 75 miles an hour with show girls in the you know that kind of stuff yeah and we talked about it on the J12 episode but I think the main reason why Hispano SW never came to fuan was because of the Spanish origin Swiss engineering and like this car sold in France built in France people just didn't really know its origin well see what happened was Mark Burkin he got hired by the Spanish to either work on the electric subway cars or buses or something so he moved his organization to Spain and then went back to building car as well I find it particularly fun driving a car that has a wartime Aro engine oh yeah yeah sou chick was a really really interesting guy as a coach Builder and where did he build them uh France France it was I believe almost positive France this car was delivered new February 17th 1923 but we we don't have official confirmation on the original owner we have a name but if our archist Lori can't find it it's probably just non-existent history you feel that torque yeah I think guymer was the guy's last yeah Gyer gy gy yeah he was uh quite a war hero shot down eight times before they finally got him imagine being shot down out of the sky in one of those things eight times all right give me another plan give me another plane I'm going back yeah man yeah i''d be good after one I think the pretty stork uh turned out to be a good story for it yeah when did the word mascot change the hood ornament I don't know I don't know I I mean I've seen them both still [Music] use how are those Servo brakes treating you you know they feel like juice brakes yeah they're pretty good yeah I mean he was a Real Genius when you look underneath you you see how it works I was trying to explain to you before but you like for just had a metal rod going to the wheel yeah if you turned the wheel it would pull the front so they would put brakes in the front he made some kind of ball in socket Arrangement so you can go around the corner and apply the brakes at the same time yeah we were on a hill yesterday just doing some Road testing and uh it'll work on a turn even downhill yeah and you can keep up with with modern traffic and this thing yeah if you close your eyes we're just heading to work this was restored in 92 yeah I'm honestly surprised it'll go up to about 70 72 when we sit but it'll bump right back down when we move so I like think get your elbow out the window in yeah it's it's not pretty comfy faster seat we're kind of close to each other but suspension's phenomenal soaking up bumps at 100 years old not bad drives very nicely so first is where third would be yes and then reverse is where second is where reverse would be in an American car believe 145 in wheelbase on this girl it's a big wheelbase I've never seen one of these I think it was a 1922 two-seater short wheeel base you know convertible top like a 32 ft light body and just look so fantastic I mean this that makes it a little heavier than it needs to be but even so it's only 2600 lb yeah the chassis is really light considering the era but it's hard to really get a total weight down for these cars with the the coach Builders you never know right up hanging a little give her a little more fuel yeah and I'm no mechanical expert but single overhead cams inline six is it's like a tractor engine they just everything's right there for you to point out and to understand and it's really easy to work on that might actually just a combination of stuff in the fuel line you know yeah hasn't been running probably 20 years right uh yeah just well we we've had it out three or no that was 6 years ago um we checked the tank Tank's clean yeah I like how dainty the needles are on the gauges yeah very flush suppose a car let's see a Rolls-Royce from the same era would be about 15 to $23,000 new so this was at the $15,000 Mark so it was right there as a close competitor but yeah yeah I still think the engineering on the his the hos are better oh yeah I think so and Rolls-Royce wasn't Rolls-Royce it was still making its name you know right yeah I think hispanos sua walked so Rolls-Royce could run [Music] yeah but she wants to run you can feel it when this car came out the speed limit was like 35 M hour and that was moving then too I mean a Model T did what model T would do 42 43 now there was no Synchro mesh no Zer you're still about 7 8 years away from synr bch but shifts very nicely yeah two to three I I have shifted it without double clutching and it give you that little jolt but it does it doesn't really much well I want to thank Cameron and the nethercut collection for bringing this over this is really a fabulous car to drive you know it's a car you don't mind driving at 45 M hour just because seeing all the gauges how all the needles are rock steady and go to the numerical equivalent on the on the face you know there's none of this nonsense going on just such a wonderful car to drive I'm glad we got a chance to bring her out Cameron thank you my friend always a pleasure Jay thanks for having back I'm glad we got to get this girl out for you yeah if you like seeing more these real kind of old Beauties go to another kind collection in SAR California it's right up the street from my garage I go there all the time see you guys he steals parts that's right I do steal Parts well as always Jay it's a pleasure thank you very much thank you

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 161,947

Keywords: Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, compares cars, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, car gear, McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, Camaro Z28, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, episode, motorcycle, ford, corvette, tour, dodge, lexus

Id: c3wQsTNlkzQ

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2024