Peter Mullin & the 1938 Hispano-Suiza Dubonnet Xenia - Jay Leno's Garage

[Music] what would another episode of Jay Leno's Garage this is kind of a special episode because we're featuring one of the most I think exciting cars ever made Dubonnet hispano-suiza this is a one-off car 1938 this is not my car sadly this belongs to Peter Mullan who owns the Mullen Automotive Museum Peter how are you well J Peter has got some of the greatest collection of French cars in the entire world probably the greatest collection in the entire world tell the story behind the car this was conceived of and built by Andre Dubonnet he was a fighter pilot world war 1 part of the famous stork squadron was a race driver but was a brilliant engineer he took a spa no 86 B chassis and then for the next five or six years he worked on a independent four-wheel suspension system which was way way way ahead of its time oil filled cylinders coil springs each individual wheel was attached so that it unsprung the weight of the car every time it turned which made it handle incredibly well did he design this body himself he did not design this body he went to South Czech okay and they conceived of this together right so Jack loved airplanes of loved aeronautical designs so together they came up with this concept which really is very reminiscent of airplane technology Yesi then curved front windows here that's right out of airplanes this is the first curved window car ever built the next one was by GM and the 50s right oh you think 38 250 wow that's a spread well there are just so many little touches on this car even the gas cap has a arrow theme to it can we show how the doors open it's pretty wild these doors may have been an idea whose time but not yet come pull it this way yeah they open like that look at that well that is very cool all right and it really doesn't take up any more space it probably takes up less space than a normal door opening window this is the ultimate in suicide doors you wouldn't want this coming open while you're gone no another miles an hour I'll tell you that if this did open at 100 miles an hour you wouldn't lose the door no the door wouldn't slip off no I mean I've had that happen I was driving my 8 litre bentley I've gone 40 and I like an idiot oh man let's look at the interior of the car while we have these doors open look at this beautiful seats and I like the sort of bamboo wrap steering wheel there and this shuts just slide it and then push brick yeah just both ends kind of evenly Wow this window is like a gold wing window it pops up okay because it's curved glass obviously can't go down into the door this entire top right here yeah pieces come off all they do so this is like the first example of the you know quasi convertible topic like a target ah wow you know this is a car I have heard about and read about over the years and you can see this car in person if you go to the Mullen Automotive Museum in Oxnard imagine the impact this months have had in 1938 just pulling up to anywhere my god I mean it still makes an impression today I guess it's art deco isn't it it is our deco yeah by the way Jay I know you're a Duesenberg cord fan a cord got the concept for the front end of the cords oh is that grille okay look at that let's uh let's open the hood and take a look what we have Wow that's like a key and it's basically a stock h6 motor correct it started life as a six B which is a six and a half liter engine but the h6 C which was 200 braking horsepower instead of 140 this has been modified to resemble the results the performance of the h6 C okay even though it's still a six and a half liter block and it is a three-speed or four-speed transmission it's a three-speed transmission three-speed transmission and of course one thing is Spanos sways are always famous for these beautiful splash panels you know most cars your wheel wells would throw mud and dirt and water up into the engine compartment and look how clean this stays because there's no way for any outside dirt or or anything to get in here and everything is metal it's cold to the touch there's no plastic on this thing beautiful porcelain exhaust you can't even get this kind of thing anymore we always think of the eighths in America but in Europe the 6-cylinder was the most powerful engine it was the smoothest engine that's why Mark Birkett did it mark Birkin and he's designed the hispano-suiza he's the guy that designed the power booster to allow mechanical brakes to have a vacuum so they work like a power brake Rolls Royce Packard all the mechanical brakes of the late 20s and early 30s that stopped like hydraulics because he developed that that system he was a brilliant engineer as well as developing the airplane engine for the Stork squadron right right the v8 the first v8 aero engine that's like my hispano-suiza here and that v8 engine was designed by Mark Birkin he designed the apparatus that allowed the wheel to turn but also applied the brake the reason a lot of cars didn't have brakes on the front you should turn the steering wheel and the rod would pull the brake and that didn't work the spineless ways is because he built them in Spain he went there to work for the railway I believe and then with King Alphonso he designed that car and he called a spinal sways a laser for Swiss hispano for Spain here's a brief visit to Peter's Museum we spent three hours there we covered a lot of stuff we didn't see everything but he he's a little taste welcome to the Mullen Automotive Museum my name is Andrew Riley I'm the deputy director and chief curator and I'm glad to have you here today within the overarching theme of the Paris Auto Salon the Mullen automotive museum also tries to provide a highly contextualized image of this age in France which is to say that we also try and talk about the art and artistry of the time behind me you'll see the Carlo Bugatti gallery Carlo Bugatti was the patriarch of the Bugatti family and a Tory Bugattis father he was a Renaissance artist who worked in many different mediums and silver in furniture he made musical instruments he also was very interested in architecture when one thinks about the cars that were to follow you have to imagine that these kinds of material explorations and these new studies and geometry would influence their work here on the museum's mezzanine level in our Bugatti club we continue our celebration of the works of the Bugatti family a look around the room will show numerous examples of this family's work behind me you see the expense of the grand salon below as well as our gallery across the way which celebrates the competition cars of the 1920s and 30s in a display intended to evoke the lamont pits of 1932 next to me is one of the stars of our collection the 1930 Bugatti Type 43 a roadster a Grand Prix Bugatti in road trim of the 170 or so type 43 Bugattis constructed only 17 were built to the a specification indicating that they were built for the American market this was a diminutive car certainly next to a Packard or a Cadillac in that time but very very sporting in front of me here is one of the only non French automobiles here at the Mullen Automotive Museum the 1927 Cooper Miller Indianapolis racing car one might reasonably ask why include this car here at the Mellon Museum this car has the unique distinction of having raced the Indianapolis 500 more than any single-car 19 times it sorry bugatti was so interested in these vehicles that he arranged a trade three type forty threes new cars in exchange for these two miller front drive cars even in the rarefied environment of the coach bill tiara there were factory built cars and there were one-off custom built cars what you see in front of you is a 1938 bugatti type 57 c ro v s-- distinct from the factory built cars this was a car that excelled in its detail a car like this in 1938 probably would have cost somewhere about eighteen thousand dollars the average new home in 1938 was only $3,800 this was not a car intended merely for transportation but it was rolling art so this is the 1938 talbo logo t-150 CSS or the gute doe as the press called it which meant teardrop in french only 14 of these cars were produced nine or so are known to exist today if you look at the shape of the fenders you'll see why it was given the name teardrop it was this use of pure form in the front and rear fenders also in the side glass this was not a time in which cars were being developed in wind tunnels even though incidentally this has an incredibly low drag coefficient these were competition cars sports racing cars really and cars the affluent would take on trips from paris to the seaside it's also worthy to note that this car has a Hemi it's a four liter power plant that made this car incredibly fast on the racecourse when visiting the Mullen Automotive Museum you'll see that this was an exciting era of exploration both in terms of art and the automobile I hope that you will also consider purchasing the art of Bugatti recently published by our Museum and available on our website and please I hope you'll come and visit us here at the Mullen Automotive Museum this is the art of the Bugatti and it's just a beautifully bound book and here of course is a very famous book this is at his museum you may have heard about this this is the famous Bugatti in the lake tell people this story this Pagani which is a 22 Brescia owned by Rene Dreyfus originally he lost the car in a poker game in Paris they say after two magnums of champagne and the Swiss gambler that wanted bon vivant tried to take it back to Switzerland of course like most gamblers you know his pocket is either full of money or it has no money so by the time he got to the Swiss border he had no money and so they said you can't bring this in without paying customs duties he said I don't have the money they said we're impounding the car you pay for within a week he couldn't do that so under Swiss law believe it or not if a car was impounded for customs duty they had to destroy it so what they did was shove this car into Lago Maggiore and the border of Switzerland and Italy but shrewdly enough they said hmm so they hung it on a 35-foot chain and sent it down into the lake but on a chain thinking that the heat would blow over and these customs guys would pull the chain back up they'd have a free Bugatti unfortunately they used a rusty chain so the chain broke from the weight and the car fell to 173 feet bottom of the lake and there was no technology that could go down 173 feet and rescue this car so it lay there for 75 years was brought back up in 2009 by the Ascona diving club and there's one of those things that always been a rumor because I'd heard about well this symbol got in a lake oh no there's not as ridiculous and so I was like a fable yeah yeah and then it turns it down to be actually true what do you need well you can see that car at his museum as well I love the fact that you haven't it's exactly as it looked as it came out of the lake they haven't done anything to it people talked about pity gonna restore that but frankly I think Bugatti the genius designer created this but Mother Nature turned it from car to art yeah after 75 years at the bottom of the lake and so this is art now so I'm not touching it it's like you wanting a Greek statue on the bottom of the ocean you want patina you're not gonna get any more patina than a man that's the most patina eyes car I have ever seen now you can get this book off your website yes it's Mullen Automotive Museum calm calm beautiful beautiful book very very nice well let's see what else we can see here look at these exhaust tips that's what I was talking about I mean every millimeter of this car is beautifully styled look at that oh that's fantastic Batmobile II is that I mean it seems to me that this is either hispano-suiza Xenia one-off car or it's a 2012 concept car yeah it's truly because there's nothing in between that even comes close and of course these fender skirts right here look at these beautiful I imagine you turn these unscrew them I get even those have a aerodynamic theme to them and there's of course the Souchak body bed south check was famous for putting a lot of chrome on cars yeah so the fact that this has essentially no chrome strips I really shows the impact that Dubonnet had on the design you have small lights here and these open up to take these open up this whole top lifts off and then there's luggage that's made to fit you have to only pack pants that have tapered legs here as you can see you're not gonna get luggage any more fitted than that really one of the most beautiful automobiles I've ever seen it actually was lost during the or nobody knew where it went reappeared in 46 yeah that's why many people have said it was a 1946 car because they'd never even seen it before the war no was it hidden during the war from the Germans it was hidden from the Germans and then they brought it back out when they opened the st. cloud tunnel yeah after the war they had a parade of cars go through the tunnel yeah into Paris and this was a car the lead wow just a real real piece of history what an exciting exciting automobile well Peter I I can't thank you enough for bringing it up by well it's really a treat and if you get a chance go to the go to the Mullen Automotive Museum in Oxnard California you saw the little bit we did on it I think you'll be very very impressed Peter thank you so much oh it's an honor to be here Jerry cool you want to drive it [Music] Peter tell us a story about why it's called Xena Tiffany's first wife was named Xenia xen IA and she died when she was about 27 after they'd been married two years and so when he finally designed to built this car he was remarried and named this after his first wife remembrance of her beauty yeah and the second wife said not on your life because why so she said get rid of that car get rid of that car I don't want any remembrance in your first life so he parked it a couple of miles away from where he lived in a garage and told her he'd sold it and he left it there for about four years let's have a less to never name a car after your first wife like Peter said it does look like it could be a concept vehicle from just a few years ago got a panoramic view and that hispano motor is one of the great engines of all time look at this thing as we go past a normal car it just looks so fantastic wow what an exciting car to drive pretty pretty amazing it said I can't describe it this is the car I've you know I've read about and and and seen pictures of since I was a kid and just to have it here my garage for such a thrill Peter thank you again so much you bet J I keep thinking Peter but I can't thank him enough will left see you guys next week

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 1,355,928

Keywords: Peter Mullin, Mullin Automotive Museum, Bugatti, Andrew Riley, Museum (Building Complex), cars, jay leno, jay leno's garage, silver, 1938, Hispano Suiza, Hispano-Suiza, Dubbonet, Xenia

Id: 9z2-TbGqG6I

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Thu May 03 2012