Jay Leno invites the president of HRE Wheels down to his garage to check out their product line. HRE produces super high-end made to order wheels in San Diego, California. The guys end up having an interesting conversation about the design, engineering and manufacturing that goes into producing a set of $20,000 wheels.
“Roadkill: No Logic, No Budget and No Shame.” David Freiburger and Mike Finnegan of Hot Rod Magazine decide to take their next Roadkill trip to Texas to pull a car out of a junkyard and try to get it drag strip worthy in 24 hours. After roaming CTC Auto Ranch in Denton Texas based on a Facebook recommendation, they decide to go with a 1967 Plymouth Barracuda that’s missing all of it’s glass, interior and gas tank. Can the guys put the car together and drive it to North Star Dragway in Houston Texas for the NMCA Lone Star Nationals or will they blow it up with a bottle of nitrous?
The Lucra LC470 follows the same formula as the original Shelby Cobra: English roadster body + American V8 power = performance. In this case, the body is a carbon fiber shell set over a steel tube frame chassis and the motivation comes from a 7.0 liter GM LS7. It all boils down to over 600 horsepower in a 2000 pound (907 kg) car.
When you think of American hot-rodding, the Meyers Manx probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. The brainchild of Southern California surfer, Bruce Meyers, the Manx formula is putting a great looking fiberglass body over a dune buggy with VW running gear. The original intent was to give people a kit where they could build a little piece of surf culture in their garage with their own hands. You build it yourself and you add whatever flavor you want to it. That’s the essence of hot-rodding. The Manx started off as a design success because it looked cool and then continued to be popular because they also worked awesome for desert racing and autocross. What a cool little nugget of American car culture.
GM’s Vice-President of Design, Ed Welburn, drops by Jay Leno’s garage with four vintage Corvettes from the General Motors Heritage Center. They start with the first Corvette ever made, the 1953 with the Blue Flame inline 6. Next they move to the chairman of GM’s personal hardtop 1958 Corvette with the dual four-barrel carburetor 283 cubic inch V8. The third car they look at is the rarest Corvette in existence, the 1959 Corvette Stingray Racer. It’s a tube-frame race car that raced here in America winning some national championships. Welburn had the car restored when he became the VP of design but kept the interior original since it had a lot of history including a drive by Elvis. The last car they look at is a fully loaded split window 1963 Corvette Stingray loaded with fuel injection and knock-off wheels. The episode is a very cool look into some very special Corvettes that could only be brought to you by Jay Leno’s special relationship with GM.