All of Jay Leno's Barn Finds: How He Found Them & Untold Stories | Barn Find Hunter

Magnesium Wheel, he's a pretty good engineer. I mean, people say, "Oh no, no problem," but anyway I don't know, that's what we did, but other than that, it's a 331 Hemi, this is what it came with a hem counting Briggs. he and his wife were the richest couple in America when they got married he was a jock he never had a job uh he he was uh Swift me packing I think uh Proctor and Gamble Proctor and Gamble and she was Standard Oil Standard Oil so they they were filthy rich and he wanted to make lamal with an American car with an American driver so he built

them

in West Palm Beach Florida as you can imagine he got the bodies from uh fali fali that's right fali fali did it it's basically a Ferrari.

The body is only 10% bigger, like the Americans were 10% bigger than the Italians, they were and they all had Chrysler two speed transmissions which was horrible, so the other thing is we put a trimic 5 speed here, wonderful car to drive. I mean, and the best dashboard, if you need your glasses to see this dashboard, you shouldn't be driving, I'm just talking about a big giant lettuce, yeah, check it out, so, yeah, it's like a Ferrari dashboard, yeah , yes, yes, because Ferrari was not far away, we know that today. They were a company that needed money and anyone would buy a body.

You are more than welcome. You did a wonderful job with this and this is the original combination with three shades. Most Cunninghams were three-tone, yes, yes, but expensive. This would cost about 15 grand and 52. The price of three Cadillacs. The price of three Cadillacs. my parents paid 19k for their house in '59 so I know I'll give you an idea so the engine is still the original 331 Hemi. The motor came with it when it left the factory. It had an engine. The engine was replaced within a year or two. this is the engine that's been in it, yeah, yeah, yeah, fantastic car, so the way it worked is the chassis is a Racing type chassis that Cunningham built in Florida, they put the Hemi engine in it, usually the rear of the transmission with Mercury suspension and Then they took that chassis and took it to New York, put it on a boat and took it to T in Italy, where Venali built these aluminum bodies.

If you look at the Ferrari 212 from the same year, it's designed by the same guy MC Giovanni motti right, it's like the Ferrari is like Jay said 10% smaller than this because the Ferrari had a small 12 cylinder and this one has a huge V8, yeah, I mean the Ferrar was 2.5L, yeah, and when I was a kid it didn't. I don't understand what that means but you realize it's really tiny yeah it's like you know you like golf tees on valves you know and I think that's it oh I guess this would qualify as a Merlin engine built by a packer we discovered we have.

Even our friends at uh V12 and toache toache make airplane engines, we had it rebuilt, it's not suitable for the air, but it is suitable for the road. I mean, the airplane standard is a completely different standard, so we wouldn't put this on an airplane, but we turn it on. and it's amazing how powerful when we put it on a truck, we put chalk on the truck, you accelerate it and you actually pull the truck that's parked on top of the trucks, yeah, so we cut the propeller a little bit to cut some of that off. that's a Packard-built Rolls-Royce, yeah, you know?

This is incredible because the Rolls-Royce engines were built to English imperial standards. There were no computers, they had to take

them

apart to build them. I mean, the English probably built one. one week we had to build one every hour, so we had to redo everything in what year is this, this is about 38 39 yes, just before the First World War, well, the Second World War had already started in Europe, yes, Well, Jay, I mean, this is, this is One of the best funny episodes of Barn Hunter that I've ever seen because the cars that Jay discovered he had the ability to mostly leave alone and just fix them mechanically so that they were Good drivers and fun to own, yes that's what I mean. the whole thing if you can't use them for their intended purpose, I mean CU.

When you get behind the wheel, you really get the feeling that when I was a k, I thought the 50s must have been very boring, but then you realize. it was really one of the most exciting periods, you had Hemi engines, just the Hemi was the most powerful American engine since the Dusenberg, it was the first to make more horsepower than the Dusenberg and a lot of people raced them and raced them and then you had the Jags, the Maseratis and all those fantastic designs, you know, when people thought that aerodynamics was much sexier than what aerodynamics actually looks like, it looks like a tear, that's fine or a raindrop, but when you look one, you know Maserati or a Ferrari, how exciting those cars were back in the day because that was their idea of ​​what people think of as aerodynamic.

A Volkswagen Bug is more aerodynamic than aach, but it looks exciting right Jay, thanks for hey, thanks a lot. Thank you very much and you know, happy hunting, today is a good day.