Shelby GT500 Powered 1968 Ford Bronco - Jay Leno’s Garage

when it goes over you feel like you enough powerboat garage pandemic edition you know I was holding off doing this this is my 1968 Ford Bronco that we've totally resto modded this was a Herculean effort by Ford Motor Company Mike Spagnola over at the SEMA garage and Tristan Contreras at right here lge cts that's the company that did the paint and the bodywork and this was given to you by my good friend Craig Ferguson fellow talk-show host what happened was my last day at The Tonight Show the TV show where I had a job he had a tow truck dumped at my parking space with it with a very funny profanity filled letter saying a Leno you're out of a job now is somebody could work on this for the rest of your life blablabla and I thought he had seen it he used Carla turned out it was his car he drove him for years and years literally drove it into the ground and and gave it to me and I thought it was very funny and he's a wonderful guy we brought it to my shop and I put it in the back for five years and one day Dave persik at Ford Motor Company I was at the shop that's my Ford Bronco I'm going to do something with it because it's let's make a project I'm Dave Peter SEC director of Ford icons here with the Jay Leno build on his Bronco hi I'm Teresa Contreras with LG e CTS Motorsports on the custom painter and designer at their shop and we're a family-owned business in San Dimas you know the Broncos and I kind of product people are spending big dollars to get restored Broncos and J had one just sitting there that just needed some love it was kind of cool you know to hear that he's had this Bronco like sitting in a corner for years and then all of a sudden now he wants to go ahead and you know redo it but then it's gonna have this crazy motor and all these people involved so it was just really cool to hear like all the pieces kind of come together we got involved because you know I was with Jay and his garage one day and and Jay had this old Bronco sitting around and he and he wanted to do something with it and wanted to know if I had a motor to put in it and so from there it just started to snowball into putting together a project and figuring out you know how we could come together to build something that would be unique and special and so here we are today this is the first time this engine has made it to a manual that is correct yes because in the and the Mustang it lives you know as you know what the dual clutch transmission right so we hadn't made it to a manual so this is the first time we've done that there was a lot of engineering went into this because we wanted to keep the essence of a Bronco we wanted it to be a 68 Bronco but with more power better brakes better handling ya know this is not the typical Bronco engine isn't the one that the car was delivered with so the car came with a hundred one hundred and five horsepower the car now has 760 horsepower so this came right out of our Shelby Mustang you can't buy this engine it only comes you have to buy a gt500 if you bought the engine but you know this is Leno so we figured we do something special I'm totally nervous about the reaction right now I mean yes I look at the vehicle and I'm like to me it's stunning it's it's refined this is no joke he wanted it to be a bit of a sleeper wants it definitely to look like a 68 Bronco but wants it to have all the cool stuff in it it's got these curves and the lines and it has all the Heritage but it has all these new modern touches that are just hints here and there you know you really have to look for them this is one of the few vehicles we did not build at my garage I was like a bride looking at a new dress it didn't make the fabric I didn't design the dress I just picked the colors in the shapes and different things like that I sat down with Dave prusik and Teresa and and Mike and I decided this Ford blue would be a great color because it's reminiscent of the original first-generation Bronco with the white top we loved doing that and and a few other things and I I picked the upholstery if you know Ford gave us the incredible engine the 760 horsepower 5.2 liter motor actually the most powerful engine Ford has ever produced up to this time for street use 760 horsepower out of the new gt500 Mustang and we decide to put this in this and well they did it in like three months it's unbelievable quickly it came together you know it takes us years to finish a project here at the garage and these guys did it in like two and a half three months I mean it was unbelievable we unveiled the car at SEMA it was pretty exciting it got a lot of people liked it they liked the fact that we kept the original look in the original shape you know Dave persik his head of I guess they call it iconic brands at Ford's you know Mustang Shelby and of course a Bronco and the Ford GT all of those you know so we wanted it to look like what it's supposed to look like and to the uninitiated it looks like a 289 Ford Bronco you know you might get a few hints when you look under you see that Kinser chassis under there which I will go into in just a minute but that was the idea we wanted to have a few clues as to what the next Bronco would look like if you look at that grill if you've seen the new Bronco that might give you pause for a minute but I think they just did an amazing amazing job and it was fun to just kind of sit back let somebody else do all the work for for a change and they certainly did it better than we could have the SEMA garage guys are unbelievable Theresa I mean the paint in the bodywork because you have to understand there's so much horsepower it was so fast so ridiculously quick alright let's go back let's make some changes I mean there was just a lot of things that had to be done the folks are Tremec made it a five-speed behind this you see this engine had never had a manual transmission hooked up to it and it's not like the old days where you sit down and you come up with a bell housing and adapt it to fit everything is computers and there was just so much that had to be done so Ford Motor Company in Detroit took on that task and did an amazing job so it really has the feel and the look and the drivability of a 68 Bronco except with 760 horsepower which is ridiculous if I'd had this counter at 16 I would be dead at 18 or 17 or 16 and a half I mean it is so powerful and so fast but it is so much fun to drive and with the Kinser chassis and and the Fox shocks and all of that I mean it's amazing how well it handles and drives considering the short wheelbase on how much power it has the cool thing is it still looks like what it's supposed to that's the original roll bar that was in the car when Craig gave it to me because this thing was driven hard and put away wet it's just beaten by a 14 to 15 owners I think before Craig got it and he drove it into the ground and then he gave it to me and luckily in the five years or six years since I got it you know trying to find to use Bronco nowadays I mean it's crazy how popular become because it is an iconic brand you know it started back in the early 60s around 1960 you know the some of the guys came home from the war and they wanted to recreate the jeep experience that you know a lot of Jeeps and International Harvester and all those kind of things were being used and modified especially out here in the West you know Wyoming - in all those places people just like that rugged off-road four-wheel drive kind of deal but since the modern super highways came in those cars really weren't adaptable you know like a Dodge Power Wagon they're a lot of fun but top speeds about 40 or 45 miles an hour even then the thing is screaming so Ford said let's make a utility vehicle that has the look in the feel of those off-road vehicles but with more compliant suspension maybe a radio maybe a heater better shock absorbers all that type of thing hence the Bronco was born and the first generation of the Bronco and the first sketches go back to by 1963 were designed by a man named McKinley Thompson who was the first African American designer ever hired by that one of the huge American automobile companies and he did the preliminary sketches for the first Bronco which I thought was interesting you knows all those kind of little things make make the car fascinating because in 1960 the market for these kind of vehicles was maybe getting around 10,000 a year which kind of got the interest of Ford and 10,000 a year maybe we can open this up a little bit so the first generation of Bronco had the six cylinder and then that's sold like hotcakes three-speed on the column then you quickly put the 289 in which made it the most powerful or just about the most powerful off-road vehicle you could get and just through sales of Broncos alone that off-road market increased almost a hundred more than a hundred percent there pretty soon they're doing fifty thousand UNC er all thanks to the Broncos uh it was a huge success from the get-go I think this whole twenty thousand Broncos boom right off the bat because there was just a hunger for this type of car you know for that off-road on-road type of deal a lot of guys you know back from the war by 1960 most of those guys are in their 40s now so they wanted something with a bit more comfort and style than a Jeep they wanted well things we take for granted roll up windows atop a heater you know those were all extras this was $2.00 the mirror with you know you want America who keep it's gonna be two bits you know wearing all those kind of things so although this first-generation Bronco seems primitive to us today it was considered quite sophisticated back in the day it really was because it just had all these features and of course they've got the new Bronco coming out well it should be out by the time this airs but we're gonna focus on this one for now let's show you what it looks like without the seats without the steering or without the roll bar without the body let me show you this Kinser chassis and all the ancillary stuff that goes with it it's uh it's pretty amazing kind of interesting fact the reason I chose this color was the first Bronco I saw when I was a kid was blue wasn't quite this shade of blue but this is a new shade of blue but it did have a white top of the white wheels and the dog dish hubcaps and I thought that really makes it look like a period Bronco so that's why we did it the interior was obviously not available then but I just liked that sort of that saddle tan kind of interior that light brown I'd like to see Ford offer this color combination in the new Ford Bronco only cuz it's a throwback you know and that when they did the sort of reimagine of the 55 t-bird back in the early 2000s member the two seater that came out they harken back to all those kind of colors from the 50s the the the bright greens and the blues and all that kind of stuff so it'd be fun to see a Ford and could do that with the Bronco show some of those sort of mimic some of those original colors but that's just me talking okay this is the Kinser chassis let me show you the original Ford Bronco chassis how simple and plain it is you gotta remember 1968 is a long time ago and it's just about the halfway point in the development of the automobile if you figure out cars really started to roll off assembly lines in mass production let's say around nineteen eight nineteen ten so now 68 is just about the halfway point and the Bronco represents that okay simple frame basic engine sturdy reliable not particularly sophisticated but it was at the time this is where we are now I mean it is unbelievable I don't pretend to be a chassis engineer or understand all how that works so I just let the guys Kinser do it for me you can see how strong it is I think this 760 horsepower engine would have just twisted the Bronco frame like a pretzel you know on my tank car that we built built with a simple perimeter frame then we had to make all these pieces to handle a torque because when you flex it it would just it would twist so we needed something to control those twisting forces and that's what they tell me it look at all the massive bracing you don't have to be an engineer to know how strong all these braces make this thing and how the engine is set in here these folks do a really good job yeah it's it's a pretty sophisticated piece of equipment and infinitely adjustable which is really great when I got the Bronco sitting a little too high I like to get on the power a little bit and I coming off an egg's it was like hey uh outlets let's bring it so we adjusted it down a little bit and we still have some fine-tuning to do actually because that will be primarily a road car in a show car you know it's it's it's actually I think almost too nice to take out in the dirt but people get a kick out of it they like it they like what it represents you know simplicity big engine in fact the engine is so big in that thing there was no room for a heater or an air-conditioner or anything it's all motor when I open that hood and you see the supercharger see how it's jammed in there it's very impressive it's very impressive but this is also pretty impressive look how high in the chassis that engine sits so center gravity it's not a Ford GT it's a Bronco you got to remember that so you know when you're coming off AG is it going to the corners you know be careful but you've got equipment here I mean look at these universals look at the size of the drive shaft you've got something here that can take the power that this motor is putting out and that's why Dave per second the guys at Ford well that's why we let them build it because hey they know what they're doing more than we do and they've got the science they've got the chassis dynamics the folks at kins are working with them they all worked as a team and in two and a half months put this together it's it's it's unbelievable to me that was able to be done so quickly so let's start with the transmission right here we have the tremec tr6060 assembly we got the crawler edge and BCR Motorsports and Ford did the wiring harness and that was unbelievable oh my god this is not anything we could have done here you've got custom airbox custom exhaust fabrication you've got Borella mufflers here I mean it just goes on and on the reason we chose Kinser is they're afforded licensee which means they are licensed by Ford to make chassis for Broncos that means Ford has looked at what they do and said yes you can put our name on it which is hard to get you know a lot of people build aftermarket stuff you notice they don't you have Chrysler's name or for its name or GM's name because they didn't get the licensing agreement you know they have to approve it they have to it's equal to or even superior to what they have so that's why Kinser was chosen and obviously the right decision because this is just an amazing piece of work here and this is not a lightweight frame by any sense but incredibly strong and like again just looking at the bracing and the way it's put together it's compared to the original frame it's it's amazing it's literally light-years away it's like there's between the Wright brothers aircraft and and the Space Shuttle you know so it's it's pretty amazing piece of work a lot of energy a lot of design went into this to take the power to take the torque of 760 horsepower it's pretty amazing what would she do now is open the hood of this one and show you that motor which is not this motor how'd you see we got the hood open obviously as are we doing all our cars we use Wilwood brakes you never I do a project I like to use the folks at will word because they're easily adaptable to almost anything they they came up with disc brakes in my 58 Imperial and we put four-wheel dishonor cuz really that was the only disadvantage of driving that car those old-fashioned drum brakes on an almost 50 500 pound car and they managed to adapt a set of discs which was not easy because Imperials are not like other Chrysler's you know it's a whole it was a separate brand in those days they were bigger stronger everything was different and they were able to do that and they did this as well and you can see it's a nice installation it's clean and of course they work perfectly well okay my favorite part one of one that's what that is that's the 5.2 liter motor with the supercharged s7 and 60 horsepower this is unique to this vehicle the Bronco symbol there the Bronco symbol here on all the caps as well as you can see this motor is just put in with a shoehorn there's just no way you could put an air conditioner or even a heater box or anything in this thing so it's pretty pretty much well fairly primitive it's all about the horsepower and to adapt this engine to a manual transmission or is not impossible because they're able to do it but you realize as I said before it's not like the old days where you get a bell housing you bolt it up and that's it there you go then after noon in the garage no it's all electronic every combination of you've got a five-speed and you've got two wheel drive and four wheel drive which is also different from the original Bronco the original Bronco was four wheel drive all the time this thing you can switch on the fly two wheel four wheel whatever you want you got a high low so the transmission had to be calibrated with the computer to every possible combination two-wheel and 5th or four-wheel drive and fifth third second four I mean it it must have taken hundreds of hours to do all that so to the engineers at Ford thank you so much and congratulations because it was it was not an easy thing to do but actually pretty impressive beautiful air intakes it's just nicely done look how clean this installation is this is not something we could have done here at the shop and certainly not in a couple of months but what about these pieces also these are all one offs these were 3d printed at the SEMA garage the guys did a great job they got the Bronco logo in there all those little pieces were all done as the grille was on a 3d printer and I think that's pretty impressive and oh you could print with those grills for your own Bronco you want to and this engine is pretty built bullet proof in this application I mean you can you can pull away in third gear at doesn't make any difference you've got so much torque in so much horsepower but very impressive okay let's uh let's close the hood oh and you'll like these uh instead of hood pins look at what we got here this is also off the new car I mean hood pins are the same ones used on the new Shelby gt500 so you just press them down and you know they open the hood okay you got the running board that comes out which was obviously not around the original and pretty minimalist in here you've got with just one gauge here but it has speedometer tachometer water temperature amp meter batter you know the whole deal fuel all that I wanted to keep the original steering wheel I love these thin wheels with the horn ring this is adjustable would I know if that was on the original note I don't think it probably was yeah pretty simple radio is in here just wanted to keep it as stock looking as possible and of course your big five-speed up here as well and cupholders didn't have those back in the day and the roof or the table does come off but you're gonna be here for quite a while with a wrench and bolting the whole thing but as you can see pretty nice you got the Bronco emblem in here spare tire back there I wanted to keep it a two seater because that's primarily it's usually just my wife when I driving this thing okay here we are at the rear of the vehicle once again you see lge cts that sounds louie and Jerry enterprises they were the husband-and-wife team that started the company now their kids are running it and cts stands for custom truck shop Theresa was sort of the paint and body person on this notice we did these where she did these in kind of a satin as opposed to these would have been chrome originally or maybe painted white but I just like that look it looks like it could be chrome but obviously it's not this is pretty old-school they all open that that way okay here you go you got your spare tire there you can push a little Weber barbecue right here cook some brats what's the game whatever you want but yeah I just like this better than I would a backseat no me anymore my deadbeat friends riding around me but I just like the feel of it I like to look at it I like to doing the Ford logo and white I think makes it look kind of cool [Music] there you go let's take a ride wait wait you laugh [Music] [Music] you just feel like you're just clawed at the ground and with this get through Cassie you're not gonna bring anything I'm gonna break any Drive shafts or universals knives in this thing first gear you don't even use it so low when you're at a fun button to stop light toy boat next to a guy in a Porsche or baby five or six-year-old Mustang Oh 69 yeah it's pretty quick done and you blow their doors off hilarious Friday goes up you feel like you enough power vote oh you can get a lot of trouble with it [Music] [Music] here holds like a train it's crazy feel on ice in there gravity when you go into a corner with this but it really is in the spirit of the original Bronco well you'll probably get a heater wind-up windows company called retro sound did the radio forest did a nice job fits right in here so I live in a hilly area so I need that extra power get me over the hill that I couldn't imagine this with putting this engine and the stock chassis it would just look like a pretzel me crazy anyway I hope you enjoyed this look at our custom Bronco here you know we had our crew we could've done a lot more in-depth stuff but I just wanted to get it out because I don't know how long this pandemic think is gonna last I think we covered everything you got the chassis here we showed you that check into any suppliers have you doing one of these Broncos because as I said Kinser is licensed by four and so everything fits you know floor there's no problem with adapting their stuff to the chance I mean it's it's really the best best way to do it anyway I'm gonna go out and have some more fun with this thing and try not to kill myself you you [Music]

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 1,341,067

Rating: 4.9346442 out of 5

Keywords: Ford, Bronco, Ford Performance, Shelby GT500, Dave Pericak, Theresa Contreras, Mike Spagnola, SEMA garage, SEMA, restomod, car porn, 4X4, offroad, off road, 4WD, Kincer, chassis, Fox, racing, LGE-CTS, 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: hzQ91ggSqZQ

Length: 27min 4sec (1624 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/trd86]

So Ford invested all that R&D into a 5.2L manual design for just clout? Wonder how much effort it was

[u/Needmeawhip]

But wont everything else in the car just break? Or is it all swapped