Jay Leno to visit Woodward Dream Cruise Saturday to pick up antique jet-powered car

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.

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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.

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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