Detroit, MI
Jay Leno to visit Woodward Dream Cruise Saturday to pick up antique jet-powered car
Jay Leno talks about electric cars
Jay Leno talks about electric cars with consumer tech reporter Dalvin Brown.
Josmar Taveras, USA TODAY
Jay Leno’s upcoming visit to the Woodward Dream Cruise has been three years in the making.
Well, really, it has been 61 years in the making.
Leno, an avid car collector and returning attendee of the Dream Cruise, will be coming to metro Detroit to see the thousands of cool cars lining Woodward, but he will also be here to pick up — and tell some stories about — his 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car, an experimental coupe built by Chrysler. The car is powered by a turbine engine and coated in a glowing orange coat of paint over its swoopy, sleek body. There were 55 of them made, and Chrysler rolled them out as a sort of publicity stunt.
Eventually, Chrysler decided it didn’t want to take the car to market and rolled them back, destroying most of them. Only nine of them still survive. Six of them are in museums. Chrysler owns two. The other belongs to Jay Leno.
Stay dry: Prepare for rain: Showers likely through Dream Cruise weekend
According to Leno’s friend, Steve Lehto, the cars ran on any liquid that burned: “You can drive these things on kerosene, diesel, palm heating oil, Chanel No. 5, vodka, tequila.”
Lehto, an attorney with a law office in Southfield and also a successful car-law-related YouTube channel with over 500,000 subscribers, has written a whole book about the Turbine Car, featuring a forward from Leno himself. The two have been friends for years, but it began with Leno poking fun at him on his late-night show, “The Tonight Show,” for a different book he had written, called “Death’s Door,” which had been advertised as a good Christmas present. Leno joked that the title was too morose for a Christmas gift, and moved on.
Lehto found it funny, and sent a copy of “Death’s Door” to Leno, along with a manuscript for his book about the Turbine Car, knowing he was a car enthusiast, on a whim. Leno called him, interested in the manuscript, and they sparked a friendship over a fascination with the experimental vehicle.
Eventually, Leno convinced Chrysler to sell him one of the nine remaining Turbine Cars.
Lehto and Leno kept in touch over the years, with Lehto even flying to California to take the car for a spin, but contact was sporadic and intermittent, Lehto said.
That is, until Leno called three years ago with a problem: The engine in his Turbine Car had completely failed. Kaput.
“He said he had tried everybody he could think of to fix the car,” Lehto said. Not even Leno’s own team of automotive experts could fix it. Leno wanted to know if Lehto knew anyone who might be able to make it run again.
“There’s only one thing I can think of that we haven’t talked about yet,” Lehto remembers saying. “The guy who is like the godfather of (the Turbine Car) was named Sam Williams.”
Williams, a celebrated engineer known for his work on turbine engines, left Chrysler in the ’60s. He opened his own business, Williams International, in Walled Lake soon after, bringing a number of the original Turbine Car engineers with him. Nowadays, Williams International specializes in jet engines on military contracts, and they are certainly not in the business of repairing antique cars.
See it all: How to make the most of 2024 Woodward Dream Cruise: When it starts, where to park, events
But Lehto said whatever brainpower went into building the Turbine Car in the 1960s went to Williams International, and if anyone could help Leno, it was them, he said.
Leno asked him whether he knew anyone who worked there.
“Yeah, my brother works there,” Lehto remembers saying.
After a little hemming and hawing, Lehto said, Williams International agreed to take Leno’s car and fix it as long as it didn’t disrupt their normal workflow.
For three years, Lehto’s brother and other engineers at Williams International worked to put the car back together after Leno had it shipped to them in crates. They 3D-printed parts in steel. They remade parts that haven’t been manufactured in decades. They rallied together long-retired engineers from the ’60s who worked on the initial Turbine Cars.
And three years later, as the product of hours of late-night and weekend maintenance, Leno’s Turbine Car started running and driving last week, Lehto said. On Saturday, he’s coming to pick it up.
Lehto said it’s the nature of the car community to come together for a project like this.
“Everybody was helping on this,” he said. “It’s true of a lot of car communities where people who rally around a particular car are happy to share their knowledge, share their expertise and even happy to share their parts.”
You might think car collectors get greedy, Lehto said, but the saga to rebuild Leno’s ride has been an exercise in sharing.
“If you’ve got one of these cars, you would think you’d hang on to your parts, like ‘Don’t touch my stuff I might need it!’ ” Lehto said. “But no, they’re happy to help because they want to see another car stay on the road.”
News reporter Liam Rappleye can be reached at LRappleye@freepress.com
A man was found with fatal stab wounds after a disturbance at McDonald’s on South Dorth Highway in Flint, the Michigan State Police reported.
The incident happened about 5:40 p.m. Friday, and involved an altercation between a 25-year-old man and a 53-year-old man, the report said. Flint Police Department responded to the call.
The 25-year-old man was the one who had fatal wounds.
The 53-year-old man was treated and released at a local hospital for minor injuries, then arrested on an assault charge.
The Flint Major Case Unit detectives are investigation. Police ask that those with information on the incident contact Crime Stoppers at 800-422-JAIL or D/Tpr. Casey McLaughlin-Smith at 810-241-2117.
This was one of two homicide cases that Flint police are investigating from this week.
SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (FOX 2) – It was a highly expensive rental that was used to commit theft in southeast Michigan.
That is what happened when a one-of-a-kind Rolls-Royce was rented and used in a string of thefts, and the owner was unaware.
The backstory:
Sam Zahar is the owner of Southfield’s Dream Luxury Car Rental, where this week, a customer rented a Rolls-Royce for $1,750 per day.
That was when the theft spree started as the suspect traversed Oakland, Wayne, and Macomb Counties, robbing banks along the way. The case is in the hands of the feds, so it’s unclear how many thefts the Rolls and the renter are tied to.
What they’re saying:
Zahar didn’t even know it was going on, as he only found out while scrolling through his phone, seeing a video on Metro Detroit news.
“This is my car,” he said. “I got a screenshot and I tried to, that’s my car. I was about probably four detectives by my house driving around thinking I stole the bank because the car is under my name.”
The driver led police on a chase, then bailed and ran on the city’s east side Wednesday night.
Police were able to recover the SUV with about $15,000 in damages, with the driver on the run.
Dig deeper:
This was, unfortunately, not the first time this had happened to Zahar, as a few months prior someone rented a car from him, then robbed a mail truck after some renters took a G-Wagon for a joyride.
Most recently, a $300,000 vehicle was likely stolen during transport from Miami to Detroit.
The Source: FOX 2 talked with the owner of Dream Luxury Car Rental.
Detroit — As the 2025 IndyCar season gets underway, 44-year-old senior statesman Will Power of Team Penske is celebrating his 20th year in the open-wheel sport. With the Detroit Grand Prix less than three months away, Power says the sport has never been stronger.
“It’s been great to watch the series evolve and get to the point where it is at right now with incredible depth of teams and drivers,” said the two-time champion and driver of the No. 12 car in an interview at a sponsor event at the Garden Theater. “With a (broadcast) partner in Fox that is promoting us tremendously — more than I have ever seen. It’s great to see.”
The addition of Fox as the motorsports’ exclusive, 2025 broadcast partner has been a big boost for the sport. The partnership has paid immediate dividends with the season-opening race in St. Petersburg March 2 gaining 45% more viewers than a year ago.
Credit Fox’s relentless promotion of the series (the only North American pro motorsports series with an exclusive TV network partner) on programs like Super Bowl LIX, with ads featuring top drivers including 34-year-old, reigning Indy 500 champ Josef Newgarden, 2024 champion Alex Palou of Spain, 27, and Mexico’s charismatic Pato O’Ward, 25.
Australian-born Power and six-time IndyCar winner Scott Dixon from New Zealand are the oldest full-time racers in the field.
Power enjoys the multi-generational talent in the sport. “(Younger drivers) have always pushed me very hard, and I’m constantly having to elevate my game. I’ve never stopped learning on how to be better. It’s kept me competitive with guys who are 20 years younger than me. I feel like I’m the best I’ve ever been right now.”
The Aussie, who won his last championship in 2022 at the tender age of 41, gives credit to improved diet, exercise, and recovery regimens for extending the careers of professional athletes into their forties.
“You have these people who just specialize in almost reversing aging actually with things you can take and do,” he smiled. But most of all, he credits determination.
“People put an age limit on it and expect people to start falling off at a certain age. I think if you set that in your head and stop working at it, then you will plateau. I believe probably the most important thing is the desire to be competive. If you’re just complacent and picking up a paycheck, you won’t be competitive. To me it’s a lot to do with attitude.”
While a win at Memorial Day weekend’s Indy 500 is the sport’s Super Bowl, the June 1 Detroit Grand Prix one week after the 500 is an important date on Team Penske’s calendar.
“Being a Chevrolet-powered team, it’s a very important event for us because they have been great partners,” said Power who has finished second and sixth in the two Detroit races since it moved downtown from Belle Isle. “To be running around the downtown in Detroit — the home of Chevrolet, the home of Roger (Penske) — it’s a good race to win.”
The tight, rough street course — coming just a week after the 240-mph banking of Indianapolis is a testament to the variety of tracks that IndyCar drivers must race to win a championship. The series is widely regarded as one of motorsports most challenging.
“(Detroit) is a hard one to win,” said Power, who scored the last win on the Belle Isle course in 2022. “It’s quite a difficult track, it’s hard to stay out of trouble and survive. That’s the sort of race that it is and the sort of track that it is.”
At Thursday night’s Accelerate Detroit sponsor event, he previewed a video of his 2024 qualifying lap to be shown to the evening’s audience. Of the four street courses that IndyCar races on its 17-event schedule, Power allows how Detroit is the toughest.
“(It’s) very narrow in spots (and) bumpy. I think it’s great for racing because you have a massively long straight so you can get runs on people. It seems to create mayhem which fans love — though not necessarily drivers, it depends where you are in the field,” he laughed. “No joke, multiple time during the lap you are less than an inch from the wall.”
Like sister open-wheel racing series Formula One, IndyCar last year moved to a hybrid powertrain to be in sync with the electrification plans of its manufacturing partners, Chevy and Honda. Unlike F1, the IndyCar system is not a full battery-electric system. It uses supercapacitors between the engine and gearbox for total drivetrain output of 900 horsepower.
“It’s added weight, its more power and torque,” said Power. “It hasn’t affected things too much, it’s quite a simple system. You push a button out of the corner to switch it on, you push a button to switch it off. I wish they would open up the technology a little more where we could play around with some of that stuff, but now. . . you can regenerate more energy which means more reverse torque when you brake.”
Power did not finish the season’s opening race in St. Petersburg, but his Team Penske teammates, Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin, finished third and fourth. The next IndyCar race is in Thermal, California, on March 23. Tickets for the Detroit Grand Prix are on sale at www. https://www.detroitgp.com/buy-tickets/tickets.
Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or Twitter @HenryEPayne.
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