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| The ultimate hot rod |
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The tank car was built by a buddy of mine, a guy called Randy Grubb. He built this body; it wasn't roadworthy... it ran but it wasn't a street-legal car. It didn't have brakes, it didn't have suspension or rudimentary transmission. So he brought it down here to show me, and I have this odd thing whereby any car that comes into the garage will eventually stay here. It's just the sort of thing that makes me laugh; it's so over the top. Plus, all my friends would say, "how come you don't have any hot rods? You always restore, why don't you build a hot rod?"
I thought here was a chance to build the ultimate hot rod; I got this thing and I got it running. I took it out on the freeway one day, but people who shall remain nameless had used a piece of heater hose as an oil line. With 90 pounds of oil pressure, boom! It burst on the freeway. I dumped 17 gallons of oil in 10 seconds. There's a tabloid story of me out in the street doing this...
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| Jay's Tank Car has a 1800 cubic inch engine - that's nearly 29.5-litres |
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We dragged it back here, we got a replacement motor, I put an Allison six-speed transmission in it, put a proper rear end on it, put springs on it, put brakes in it. I thought let's make it a proper road car, and that's what it is now. It's a lot of fun. It's so big in fact that whenever I have Arnold Schwarzenegger on my TV show I always bring it, because he calls it "ze Terminator car. Jay, I love zis car. Zis is ze car I should be driving." Because it looks like him from the front, you know.
We raced the tank car against an Abrams tank. It was in Car and Driver. It did quite well considering it's five tons! We did the quarter- mile in 12.9 seconds. Getting five tons off the ground, once it's movin', jeez, it picks up speed, with 1600 pounds of torque. It's like a stone - it just starts rolling. It rides nicely. Well, five tons will flatten out anything on the highway.
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