Inside Jay Leno’s petrol head
@hugo_griffiths
Tackling the motoring issues that matter
PRETTY much everyone has heard of Jay Leno. After hosting The Tonight Show on NBC in the US for more than two decades, he became such a well-known figure that Barack Obama (among others) sent him a farewell message when he finally left the programme after more than 4,600 episodes.
The Tonight Show is very much a US institution, but petrolheads around the world will be familiar with Jay Leno’s Garage, which has been going for around 15 years on TV and YouTube, notching up almost 700 million views on the latter platform alone.
Just as Jay opens up his vast garage and huge collection of cars and motorcycles to millions of viewers every week, so too he was good enough to give up an hour of his time to speak to Auto Express. Once we’d got over the pinch-yourself moment of answering an unknown telephone number to hear: “Hey, Jay Leno. How are you?”, we got down to talk.
On how he got into cars and engines
WE begin by asking Jay how he found his love of cars, and the story is as amusing as it is interesting.
“I grew up in New England, in a rural area about 20 miles from the New Hampshire
