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Photography by Ted Gushue
Petrolicious founder and CEO, Afshin Behnia, will soon appear alongside his 1965 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint Speciale on Jay Leno’s Garage, and we had a chance to look around the expansive assembly of cars, bikes, and everything else.
It does feel a little silly and incorrect to call Jay Leno’s garage, a garage- it’s sort of like calling an aircraft carrier a boat. This is a collection that gives even the most jaded individual an acute case of automotive ADD. To think of this place as just (just?) an expanse of unique cars spanning numerous countries and decades is to be narrow-minded in the extreme. One could write doctoral theses on a single wall of automobilia alone. There’s just so much of everything to take in that it all kind of congeals your brain into a gut reaction of simply, “wow.” Using more words somehow doesn’t seem appropriate for a place that includes a Mercedes 600, a Ford Shogun, and a twin-turbo tank-powered ‘car’ under the same roof. It turns into babble very quickly. So we’ll let the photos put it into the thousands of words that I can’t.
A true car guy can appreciate a Fiat 1100, a Panhard, a Galaxie big block all at the same time, Jay has maintained that little boy awe of cars that “carguys” started out with in their youth. Yes, the Dusenbergs are great but a Shogun is cool. The youtube videos are so well done, you can listen to them while traveling like audio books. Great pictures – looking forward to Petrolicious on Leno…
You do not know then that every one of those cars is in running and driving condition and actually sees street time. Unlike collections by notable others around the world. He restores, maintains, AND drives them all.
Also, turn down the saturation a bit. Just because you can does not mean that you should. It muddys the photos.
One thing amongs’t many that I love about Jay’s philosophy of cars, and car collecting is that he drives many of these wonderful cars. I heard him say one time that he thought , any car that was a 100 point concour’s winner should be driven like the dickens down to nearly exhaustion and then brought back to original condition by the next custodian. Gotta love that !!