Jay Leno Has No Plans to Slow Down with His Cars

The news hook here is that Jay Leno’s Garage will be available on a new distribution outlet called RIG TV. But that was just the excuse to go hang out with Leno and see his fabulous collection again.

Even Leno himself isn’t entirely certain what RIG TV is, nor is he overly familiar with other media through which video content moves from the producers to the audience. He says he just likes making the content for people to enjoy, and if there’s a new outlet for them to see it, so much the better.

“What is it? Well, I guess it’s a new channel,” he said when we asked. “I have all these fast channels out now. You got Hulu and all this, where you can just put all our content. I’ve got 1,100 videos. And then we have seven years of Jay Leno's Garage. And so people can go there, go to RIG TV, you can get (it) on Apple. Just more people pick it up. And you just put all your content out there.”

When you’ve made 1,100 “or so” videos, you need a few channels to share them.

“People look up the kind of car they want to hear about, and we usually have a video on it. And we continue to do that. It’s fun,” he said, sitting in his collection in Burbank.

Unlike some collectors, who hoard their cars in warehouses and never take them out, Leno is generous with his time and his collection. He and the cars and bikes are semi-regular fixtures at car shows around Southern California and across the country.

I happened to arrive on a motorcycle, and Jay wanted to see it first thing. It was a BMW R12. “What’s this make, 100 horse?” he asked.

He always says it that way, “horse,” not horsepower. It might be something from his youth in Andover, Massachusetts. The R12, one of the smoothest and easiest big-bore bikes to ride ever, with an 1,170-cc boxer engine, makes 95 horse.

Then we wandered into the workshop at the collection, and he showed me a few motorcycles.

“This is what I’m riding lately,” he said, standing next to a Brough Superior with what was called a petrol tube side car. The sidecar was surrounded by a big loop of thick metal tubing.

“They’d fill that (the tube) with gasoline and pressurize it with two or three psi,” he said. “So you’d have a reserve gas tank.”

Of course, if you hit anything, the tube would crack and pressurized gasoline would spray all over everything.

The bike also had the throttle as a thumb-operated lever, another somewhat dangerous design. Early bikes hadn’t been as well-sorted as they are now—designers were making it up as they went along.

“What could possibly go wrong with that design,” I asked.

“These guys didn’t always live that long,” he said.

We walked back through the collection and he stopped at another bike, a 1924 Ace, the successor to the Henderson four. It had a 1,400-cc longitudinally mounted straight four that would take the bike up to 132 mph. It was less efficient at bringing it down from those speeds.

“In England you had to have two brakes on a motorcycle. So they put ‘em both on the rear wheel. To stop you press this one (the right pedal) that pulls the brake on this side and this one (on the left) to grip the wheel on the other side.”

But if you’re stopping you also have to put in the clutch pedal, which you can’t do because you have both feet on brake pedals.

“Then you use your hand clutch. Then, when you want to take off again, you put in the foot clutch, release the hand clutch, then put the throttle on, you might as well just sail through the intersection without stopping and say, ‘Hello! Thank you!”

We went around another corner and found a three-wheeled, enclosed vehicle.

“This was built by a guy named Bob Shotwell when he was 17,” Leno said. “He wanted a car, but he couldn’t afford one.”

So Shotwell found an Indian motorcycle engine and some Model T fenders and built the car himself. But he didn’t use it for city driving. He drove it from Minnesota to Alaska to San Diego and back to Minnesota with his brother.

People don’t do things like that anymore.

How did Leno acquire it? When Shotwell was getting on in years, he was afraid someone would find the car and steal the engine. So he offered it to Leno on the condition that he rebuild it, which he has. A lot of cars and motorcycles find their way to Leno’s Garage that way.

“They find you.”

I asked him the story about his dad’s Ford Galaxie. Even though he’s told the story a hundred times, he still smiled.

“That’s a true story,” he said. “We had a ‘64 Galaxie 500 XL. I just love those things. So two years into owning that my father says, ‘Let’s go, we're getting one of the new Galaxies.’ By two years in Massachusetts, you’ve got rust coming through everything because of the salt.

“So we go into the Ford dealership. Tom Lawrence was the salesman, Shawsheen Motors, and it was just Mustangs and Falcons, because that was the hot car. My dad normally bought what was on the showroom floor. ‘Give me that one,’ even if it didn’t have a radio.

“He said, ‘Where are the full-sized cars?’ Tom said, ‘Well, you have to order one. It’ll take six weeks.’ I said, ‘Can I pick the engine?’ Okay, I took Tom aside and said, ‘We want the 428, police pursuit package, muffler delete option, bucket seats, big alternator.’ I couldn't get the manual trans because my dad was against four-speeds. So we got the automatic transmission. My father, he has no idea what he signed.”

Six weeks later the car arrived. First thing Mr. Leno noticed was the bucket seats.

“My father went, ‘Bucket seats? I don't want bucket seats.’ Now, he’s already pissed off. He gets the key, starts the car, and hears the exhaust like some kind of stock car racer. ‘There’s a hole in the goddamn muffler! It’s a brand-new car and there’s a hole in the muffler!’ Tom the sales guys tells him, ‘It’s part of the police pursuit package.’

“He looks at me now, and he knows he’s been had. My dad puts it in gear and it fishtails all over the place. He goes, ‘It’s a goddamn rocket ship!’ This thing is just screaming. He’s just furious with me, you know.”

But he kept the car. And there was a happy ending. Sort of.

“So, like, two weeks later, I’m in his bedroom looking for something and I see on his nightstand, he got a ticket for going 110. So, he liked it. He was a manager of an insurance company, and all the insurance sales guys, they were all young. So, they say, ‘Hey, Angelo’s got the hottest car of all of us!”

As a result, one of the 180 cars in the collection is one of those “7-Liter” Galaxies.

Every car in his collection has a story.

I had time for just one more—the Rolls-Royce with the Merlin V12 engine from a Spitfire. He bought the V12 and a P2 chassis, and the guys in his shop built the rest.

“Wanna hear it start up?”

He climbs in and starts throwing switches. There are three magnetos: Mags 1 and 2, one for each bank of cylinders, and a starting magneto. First, he switches on the oil primer, a pump that squirts oil throughout the engine. He holds the oil primer button until a gauge indicates he has 50 pounds of oil pressure.

He switches on the magnetos, then spins a small crank called the “shower of sparks” that sends sparks randomly to all 12 cylinders to help start the big 12, then hits the starter.

Braaaaapppp! It fires. Leno smiles.

Soon my time is up and I’m back on the R12 riding down Interstate 5 through Burbank, better for the experience, wondering if all that really did just happen. Be sure to find Jay Leno’s Garage on RIG TV, or Hulu, or Freevee or just on YouTube.

How it gets to you is not Jay’s job. Making content about cool cars and bikes is. And he has no plans to ever stop doing that.