1955 Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno

1955 Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno Photo Gallery

Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno
Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno
Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno	Buick Roadmaster - Jay Leno

I recently read in one of those bling-heavy import-car rags that, in hipster lingo, to "Jay Leno" a car is to hide it in a garage and rub on it. But that's not the dude. Living near The Tonight Show studios, I frequently spot Leno driving hilarious stuff: Stanley Steamers on Hollywood Way, a Mercer Raceabout on the I-5, a tank-V-12-powered (and 30-foot-long) roadster at the sandwich joint ... it never stops. The crew at his cavernous and grossly enviable Big Dog Garage keeps all his cars in streetable condition so Jay can drive a different car every day. And sometimes two a day. So he's a legit car guy. Jay claims he's always been into cars, and as a kid in Andover, Massachusetts, he swindled his dad into ordering a 428ci Police Interceptor package for the new family two-door Galaxie. His first vehicle was a '34 Ford truck he bought before he could drive, and in high school he bought a '65 Buick GS with a 401 and a four-gear and played hooky laying patch in the school parking lot. But we wouldn't call him a hot rodder of the traditional ilk, though his '25 Bentley single-seater with a 8.3L twin-turbo inline-six reveals what might have happened had Muroc been on the outskirts of Crewe. Surprisingly for a guy with a Viper GTS, a nitrous'd Festiva SHOgun, and a 514hp Z06, Leno seems less awed with going fast than with the intricacy, the engineering, the history, and the character of his cars. As he walks you around the Garage he mumbles the remarkable specs and quirks of every vehicle in his fleet, and when you get to the McLaren F1, it's the car's titanium toolset that he shows off. He's got a motorcycle powered by a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter turbine that may run 260 mph, but he revels most in its 58,000-rpm redline, the exhaust-gas temp that melts bumpers in traffic, and the bike's proclivity for belching fire upon shutdown. He says, "I want to really experience whatever I'm driving." Right.