The Missing Talbot-Lago - Jay Leno's Garage

[Music] welcome to the episode of jay leno's garage the car featuring today well i guess it's kind of automotive royalty uh this was one of the premier cars certainly the french coach building era table lago gsl tombow lago is one of those storied brands that goes back to just about the beginning of the automobile it was derock early uh in the turn of the last century it was taobao duroc and then it got bored and sold which brings up to this point a man named anthony lago antonio lago he was british and italian he took the company over in about the mid 30 sometime you know one of these go for broke all the time never had any money but built some brilliant cars some brilliant grand prix cars six-cylinder engine uh dual cam not overhead cam dual cam i'll explain that in just a minute and this was the swan song he was broke the company was broke by the time they built these this was i think it's safe to say a pre-war type car built after the war by that i mean the classic coach building a lot of wood in the doors and how i came to find this i knew a gentleman he was 98 years old and invited me down to look at his cars and i saw this when he thought i was kind of interested in it and i politely said you know if you ever decide you do want to sell something i'd be interested in this one and he said well i need to come to your garage and see your stuff you know before i decide whether you should all right i get that i'm the same way you know i know somebody's gonna take care of it and he came here and he was suitably impressed so he he let me buy it and he sadly he passed away uh soon after that he was all set to take this up to uh pebble beach now it's interesting he had fascinating cars he had a lamborghini mirror he bought new 900 miles he had an ats same thing eight 900 miles jaguar x-cam won all the great cars of the 50s and 60s he owned and he would drive them and park them and he went to france to try and find one of the teardrop cars he couldn't find one he found this he bought it in the early 60s in 1964 1965 he had it flown from france to lax he went to the department of motor vehicles got a one-trip permit drove it from lax to his warehouse in orange county and parked it and it sat there from 1965 until i pulled it out last year to say it needed a fair amount of recommissioning that's what they were saying auctions you know when a car is original might need some slight recommissioning wow that just needed recommissioning he drove it from lax to his warehouse with a full tank of gas and it sat for whatever 60 years just about with this full tank of gas and oil everything we got it here put it up on the lift let me see the gas tank i said it looks good not a lot of rust but my hand went right through it and then just tons of dirt and rust came out of it uh well here here's what the tank looked like you see we cut it open you can see how rotted it was inside we tried to use as much as the original metal as we could the filler neck and some of the other pieces but we had to fabricate a whole new tank it looks exactly like the original so you you can't tell the brakes were a nightmare because you have steel brake lines in this and i had never seen um brake fluid what it looks like after sitting for 60 years but literally turns to a gel luckily we had a a transmission flush type machine that heats up this liquid to its boiling and just keeps forcing it through and we managed to clean out all the lines but that took weeks to get all the lines clean and of course master cylinder had to be re-sleeved and you're not going to find another one because this is a unique vehicle but as you can see we got it together this is original paint original interior we have not touched that we trued up the wheels this is interesting this is 1952 1953. france did not have the technology to curve glass like they did at general motors so they made this out of plexiglass they wanted to have curved glass uh carlos de less designed this body another interesting gentleman i tried to find a picture of this guy it doesn't exist anywhere but he was a very gifted designer i think it's a beautiful car it's just fascinating it's a full-size automobile it's got a front seat and a back seat the t26 grand sports were the legendary ones this is as i said the company's going out of business by the 50s he took one of the old record chassis and shortened it i think it's 110 inch wheelbase this has 220 horsepower as webbers on it now this car was raced now it says competition here but this i know for a fact this particular script is off a dela hay so somebody races race this car the other unusual thing it has a manual gearbox these never came with manual gearboxes they had what you call a wilson pre-selector which is uh exactly what it says uh i think auburn had one uh and the cord had one rather uh it's a thing where you put the lever like you pull away in first gear with a clutch then as you're driving you move the lever to the second gear then when you want to change gears like the ferret tank we had a couple months ago you hit the pedal and boom it shifts automatically and you pre-select each gear it works quite well but it was heavy so it made it tough to race these because of the weight penalty somebody converted this to a manual transmission i have contacted peter larson the guru of these cars and this car is a missing car i think they only built 19 of these something like that this is the only one that is unaccounted for uh he sent me some uh an ad for a manual transmission he sent me a picture of this car this this car was used by the french magazines to road test some other facts like that but other than that it's sort of a lost car so i assume somebody put a gear box in it it's not american i think it's porter moussol i hope i'm saying that right that's the french gearbox that chrysler used in the 50s but it looks like a factory job it doesn't look like a hot rod somebody raced this car because even the weber carburetors that are on here i think this conversion must have been done at the factory because all the dashboard knobs and the shift knob match it's not like this has a big white ball or something on it for a shift knob so that's unusual too so somebody wanted one of these with a manual gearbox which i must prefer the wilson pre-selector is interesting but it's fun to be able to shift gears yourself it's probably heavier than it needs to be their core chassis was not light this is not like the t26 chassis that was used in the pre-war cars those were a little shorter wheelbase and faster uh lago had to go with what he had and i think he did a fine job this is what you would call a grand touring car in the style of a db5 or db6 uh as i said extremely fast for the time uh you know the xk 120 had 160 horse this is 220. so yeah so there you go so right there that makes it uh pretty quick and these were just crazy expensive i'm not sure what the analogy would be but whatever normal cars were this was way more put it that way way more than aston martin or any of those cars because they were hand built i mean the factory looked like something out of world war one or certainly in pre-war you know by the 50s everybody's getting money machinery and coming back and lago had no money he just had to go with what he had the old guys you know boom boom with the hammer and all that the doors were a bit heavy so they pulled on the hinges we pulled the doors and we i see that's the trick we replaced all the wood in here this awful lot of wood in this car so that does make the car heavy as well let me show you the book i'm talking about here this is the table log the car from paris the name of this book peter larson and uh ben erickson uh this is the ultimate book on these you know i i when you have a car like this we only built 19 of them it's not going to be a best seller and it's it's a real labor of love to do these kind of books they're expensive to produce but believe me don't get rich doing them and uh i i just want to thank him for doing it and you know and just being historians and saving history because that's real important you know somebody's right now is writing the book on the mid-engine corvette and and all the cars that are for 100 years from now people are going to want to know and for the 19 of us that have these cars this is this is the bible um i'll show you some of the pieces some of the things on this car once i open the hood this well well it's two volumes one is the history and the other is the cars and there's detail shots of the engine and how it all goes together and how it works and sort of the story of lago who was a bit of a i wouldn't say a flim-flam guy but he yeah he could charm his way into things he see what happened was he managed to get control of the wilson pre-selector transmission company and he put it in every every one of these that was built cabo lagos had the wilson priest electric gearbox because he made money on each one so somebody obviously changed this and it like i said it looked like a factory job but even he didn't know because there's just no history on this car uh let's open the hood up show you the engine now remember this is not a restored car this is just a preserved car so it's not as shiny as some of the other engine compartments a six-cylinder engine 4.5 liter which is huge by european standard well it's pretty big here too a good size motor once the socialist socialist government took over in france that pretty much ruined the coach building industry because the french i've said this before germany was the birthplace of the automobile but france france was the nursery francis were all the original ideas system pannard and all that kind of thing came from after the war the government decided no no i'm not going to build any fancy cars any engine more than 2.7 liter will be taxed literally out of uh out of you know off the planet so consequently these big engine monsters that were hand built were they just couldn't be sold at any sort of practical price they were just taxed ridiculously high and there weren't any customers for them and that was the end of that but this is the last of that era this is the the last sort of last stand for taba lago and you can see all the pre-war stuff look at this you have a a crank here this here so you can hand crank the engine not so much to start it although i suppose you could but mostly just set timing and whatnot uh this looks like it's dual overhead cam it is not these are rockers under there these are just valve covers you have two cams down in the block let me show you the picture here's the pictures in the book that will explain it to you as i said this book does a wonderful job explaining how this engine works it's similar to i think the riley in england use the same sort of deal two camshafts low in the block short push rods hemi head which is pretty cool with central plug position so it's an impressive motor i mean by the 50s the italians are coming up with all sorts of interesting stuff so he was soldiering on with his old-fashioned design but very robust motor you have an aluminum head on it uh you know i've overheated this thing twice once when the water pump once when the crankshaft pulley broke and i didn't realize it and then the other fan belt you know a fan belt broke the other day on this and we were using the original fan belt so i wanted to get ready for today's shoot so let me take it around the block so build them out in the freeway okay now i'm stuck so i called george our chief mechanic you know george it's great he'd been working on the car and then he said wait a minute i think there's a fan belt in the trunk can we open the trunk and there it was a brand new 1965 fan belt still in the original wrapper and we it's on there now i'm going to replace it this afternoon and get a better one and you can see somebody has put all this writing in here in french it's just what kind of oil to use what weight and whatnot look at these webbers if anybody knows that model of weber let me know because i don't know what it is somebody put these on normally this would have solexes on it three of them but somebody put these webers on to go racing with and uh as i said this car is really really fast here's your plate right here with your engine numbers on it stock radiator obviously we replaced the fan with this uh it just happened to be red i couldn't get one that was just standard gray but everything else is exactly as you know so funny when we got this engine it had been sitting and we tested compression it was zero it was like okay you got to tear this whole engine down so we pulled the spark plugs and we filled the cylinders with the cylinders with a combination of acetone and atf automatic transmission fluid and let it sit for a week ten days and it came back 125 in every cylinder which is not the end of the world but it's good and it's fine now it was just parked it wasn't pickled nobody put it away up on blocks you know obviously we got new tires but the originals held there they're 18s which are hard to find what else is under here you've got a modern optimum battery that kind of gives it away but everything is exactly as it should i mean it's a time capsule you know this car is so unusual i believe it's the only uh gsl the l stands for long with the original bumpers because these were just abandoned on the streets and sent to used car lots when they no longer had any value in the mid 60s early 70s so you can't even get bumpers yeah even the ones at pebble beach don't have the bumpers on them so i think this is the only original car it might be the only one left with original paint original interior original bumpers and still has of course the original engine uh what else can i show you on here i have fuse boxes up here now come on let's go around to the rear of the vehicle lots of aluminum and steel come on to the back it's kind of cool the way the spare tire is yeah that fits in there these straps hold the tire right here you have your gas cap is here protects it then you have a piece of leather it's supposed to go over there but yeah pretty good size tron because the tire takes up the whole thing that'll give you some idea and the fan belt was under there which is kind of cool as i said these bumpers really hard to find they just don't exist anymore it's so funny to think that these cars are just literally thrown away because in france gasoline tax is so high something at 4.5 liters and this gets horrible gas mileage i don't know what it is but it's i think it's the same as like a chrysler hemi it's like probably 9 to 12 something like that just big motor big pistons and it's not like a modern engine which is sufficient you know love the taillights love the reflectors i would love to hear from anybody has information on this on this gearbox if you've dealt with these things before i'd like to know more come on let's let's show you the interior now and you see you've got these door handles which are quite popular in the 50s the cunningham had this as well replaced all the wood inside here classic dashboard original leather i'm trying to bring this leather back using hide food the cool thing is it's real leather it's not like modern leather you know people use high fruit on modern leather it doesn't make any difference because it's all sealed but this stuff really breathes gives off this aromatic smell you've got a claw everything here is different that's on that's off the exact opposite you know french switch gear can be very confusing but let's do the have a clock all jager instruments speedometer uh you have your water temperature you have uh ammeter uh oil pressure and uh all that and gas gauge over there that's the one i had to rebuild a french coast is an ashtray horns are up here there you go classics i've seen the steering wheel before i think de la hay had it as well it's odd clutch is way over here on this side but plenty of headroom beautiful car to drive handbrake here i advance and return on the ignition which is very unusual for a post-war car most cars were pretty much uh automatic advanced and by that time what else what else i don't know maybe it's time to take it next door put it up on the lift and show you what it's like underneath these are notoriously cold-blooded there's no chokes on these webers all right there she is up on the lift as you saw we utilized the old original tailpipe we tried to save as much metal as we could as you see uh jimmy did a great job fabricating this gas tank all the original we used much original pieces as we could this is original he put all the the uh folds in there as they should be yeah he did a great job on that gas tank see all the all these original pieces we tried to save as much metal as we could there's your end and of course you've got leaf springs back here massive hydraulic uh drum brakes as you can see on both wheels something not original but original to the car when i got it was this muffler here uh mitchell i know this subs appears to be american i don't know it looks like we used to call a cherry bomb type muffler or if it's a muffler at all really here's the gearbox okay i don't know what this gearbox is i think as i said porter musal this looks like a factory installation to me this does not look like it was done at some hot rod shop outside of paris i could be wrong i don't know i'm hoping maybe some buddy much smarter than i and talbos could tell me this i'm still learning on this car it's only been we've only had it about a year and most of that time it's been getting running george has done a wonderful job on the engine we've managed to save as many pieces as we could there are some numbers there maybe somebody can tell you something you've got coils up front independent suspension i think these may have been the first pre-war cars to have independent front suspension i'm not sure talbot as i said is an old company uh well here's an example of old school look at those lever type uh shocks up there in front and you see you've got the big scoops for cool the drums as you can see obviously new brake lines you don't want to be that original i mean cleaning these brake lines took weeks weeks of just soaking and cleaning and oh my god then running literally barley hot fluid through to get them all back to original but it would have been a herculean task to uh pull the uh steel brake lines out from inside the body and refabricate them but these are all original exhaust head all original pipes here i think this car was raised but i don't think it was driven a whole lot as you can see it doesn't appear to have been in an accident or anything all of this looks pretty good the recore chassis see drilled for lightness and shortened up a bit and he was out of money not sure what that's doing on it it's supposed to be on there okay fix that a bit later still got the original shock so all right let's uh take it for a ride let's see how she goes i know newer cars are faster and better made and more dependable but there's something about these old girls i just find attractive i just find them the handmade quality of it and obviously we long past the day when hands make something better than machines but there's something about it i just find intriguing hearing those carburetors suck air that way such a torquey motor i've had this engine got hot on me twice as i said one time we broke the uh keyway on the uh on the crankshaft damper and uh harmonic ballasts are there rather and uh that just fell apart so we had to make another one of those got that going and then whatever reason we kept the 60 year old fan belt on there and that just i was on the highway yesterday that just went into a million pieces then i started smelling oil coming through the floorboards they go what's that i thought maybe there's a fire uh it just gotten so hot the oil was beginning to turn into white smoke i guess what i like about these kind of cars is still mechanical human hands made it human hands can fix it you know you get a modern car like a hyper car or something and a computer built it and a machine welded it and that's pretty much it you know there's not much the human being can do this is not a small car it's probably about the size of a mustang i guess [Music] with a back seat about as big as a mustang wasn't hard driving on the rise no it's the same thing really except you're shifting with the other hand but other than that being one of the last coach built cars to come out of france it's kind of interesting when you look at when you take the door apart you see the kind of nails that they use the kind of wood that they use and uh i mean you had to be a carpenter to work on a car back in this day but the fact that it survived this well i mean you know i've got um some books about uh the streets of paris you know and i got it because it showed a lot of cool cars you know parked on the streets during world war ii and uh in the 30s and there's one or two of these and they were just old cars that's all they were you know nobody could afford to drive them because gas was so expensive i do like the wilson freeze electric gearbox but i think it's kind of neat since this is one of the well so far it's the only known one with a manual gearbox and i find it kind of fascinating that peter larson the author of the book was fascinated because this was an undiscovered car nobody knew where it went you know it was sold in 65 and never seen never written about never showed up on a car show so there are no pictures there are no anything you know if you want to uh go to peter's website uh here's his here's his uh there's his website up here check it out he's got a couple of other cars car books coming out as well you know he he does the just these fabulous books on all the great coach builders and uh just beautiful work i highly recommend it i'm hoping to get them down here so i can take a ride in this thing and see what you think it pulls really strong you almost don't need attack because you've got such such torque in every gear it's amazing how many brilliant engines were designed pre-world war ii you know the bmw 328 which also went into crystal the eighth lead of bentley the guzenberg this motor [Music] we here in america tend to look down as a six cylinder engine it's nothing but a full relation to the v8 because the eights were cheap in america and popular but in in europe the six cylinder was like it was here it was it was quote the big block you know cool horn this is a big fast touring car boy the previous generation grand sport had more sporting potential than this one with the gsl but still they're so rare to get anyone that's in the tree it's an honor actually i'm honored that uh the only job i don't want to use his name i didn't ask the family but it was funny he came he looked at my cars he said okay all right when i'm gone you can buy one of my cars that's all right so i don't want you to go no matter what gear it just pulls so nicely when that when that engine comes on it just sounds fantastic these 18 inch cars flat spot pretty easy so you've got a driver for good ten miles before the rubber gets soft enough too back to be around again i see why this car didn't have a radio it's just you just enjoy listening to the engine that's a pretty fast car even by modern standard it just got so much torque i think most people would think this was a va to wear riding in it for the first time i didn't know people described antonio lago as a greece monkey and an engineer and i think that's something he would have been proud of actually uh he really never had the finances to fund his projects properly so the fact he was able to build cars win grand prix sell luxury automobiles is is a testament to just this skill and kind of charming people i mean you read the book and you realize oh some people didn't think a whole lot of them but this is one of the great cars if the government of france hadn't cracked down it's interesting to see how big the french custom car industry could have gotten or could have remained you know i mean they did such beautiful work it just was not feasible from a tax standpoint to build anything there because luxury cars were boudoir and you know blah blah all that kind of stuff and they wanted to build smaller cars like little renault in the true cv and all that kind of thing you know french government figure if you really wanted a car like this boy you were going to pay and pay and pay and that's pretty much what happened they just want enough people around to keep them going [Music] it's a very dramatic car to drive you feel everything you sense everything smell the leather even the wood you know when you find a car like this thing you always have that decision do you restore it or do you just maintain it and i i chose to deserve this to maintain it because the engine hasn't been out of it uh at least not in the last 60 years that i know and it's just the way it left the back [Music] uh it's just fun to save a piece of history to preserve a piece of history i mean this is going down the highway in 1952 at 100 miles an hour was a rocket you know just unbelievable and it's still pretty quick by today's standards but anyway i want to thank peter larson for doing the work on this and having all the facts and the knowledge there you know guys through those kind of books it just makes it easier to restore and find out exactly how they were supposed to be as opposed to what people thought of what they imagined it was so peter thank you very much and mr erickson as well and uh i'm gonna go through and see you guys next week thanks [Music] uh

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 556,960

Keywords: Talbot-Lago, coachbuilt, barnfind, rare cars, French cars, car enthusiast, car guy, car nerd, gearhead, motohead, car porn, Antonio Lago, GSL, Grand Sport, Pebble Beach, Concours d'Elegance, survivor, original and unrestored, Competition, racing, heritage, unicorn, Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage

Id: 8rd6sLDrdJk

Length: 33min 54sec (2034 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/dumahim]

I guess Jay Leno's Garage channel just isn't going to show in my subscription feed anymore.