The story starts in Leno's garage in Burbank, California. He's a fellow with a taste for gonzo vehicles and a job that lets him eat big. Perhaps you've heard about the motorcycle with the helicopter turbine engine? How about the Rolls-Royce Phantom stuffed with a 27-liter Merlin V-12 from a World War II Spitfire?
Not long ago, while inspecting these and other oddballs in the three-building collection where the motto is "More money than brains," we were introduced to the "Tankrod." It's a 21-foot aluminum-bodied roadster on shaved Goodyear garbage-truck tires with two cozy seats situated behind what appears to be a small oil refinery. It looked dangerous and expensive, mayhem with headlights. At once we knew we had to tell you about it. To do that we had to drive it. To do that we had to develop a story pitch.
A few inquiries revealed that the car is not the work of Jesse James, Boyd Coddington, or even ExxonMobil, but one Randy Grubb, a glass artist from Grants Pass, Oregon. Grubb announced to his wife one day in 2001 that he was taking exactly one year off from making $10,000 antique-style French paperweights to realize a vision that was forming in his head around a 2000-pound Continental AV-1790-5B.
That's an engine, specifically, an aluminum air-cooled 1792-cubic-inch V-12 making 810 horsepower and 1590 pound-feet of torque. Doesn't ring any bells? Uncle Sam ordered up thousands of this mother of all motors for the 51-ton M-47 Patton tank, the nation's first line of defense against communists, aliens, the Blob, anything that threatened America in the '50s. Powered by gasoline at first, the engines were quickly converted to diesel when gasoline proved touchy in the presence of exploding munitions.
Inspired by a pal's hot rod and its 1000-cubic-inch firetruck engine, Grubb located a stash of gasoline AV-1790s on the Oregon coast. He christened the project the "Blastolene Special"the made-up word just sounded coolwhile cobbling it together in his garage using junkyard truck parts and a Greyhound-bus transmission. Grubb says, "I knew from the start I would eventually sell the car to Jay Leno. Luckily, I have enough of Jay's money to build another car and continue not making glass." Grubb figures he made $25 per hour for 5000 hours of work. You do the math. His wife certainly did.
Thus, we have a tank-powered car conceived by a glass artist and owned by a celebrity with a world-famous chin. This had the makings of a high concept at least as good as Gigli. All we needed for a solid draw was some gunplay and explosions. That's when we called the Army.
Capt. Danilo Gannod answered the phone in the public-affairs office at the U.S. Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin near Barstow, California. Gannod was the first to hear the story pitch involving a major star, a tank-powered car, a tank-powered M1A1, and a dramatic race between the two. He chuckled, then asked, "Really?"
Fort Irwin is the Top Gun school for tanks. During 28-day rotations, visiting American armored units fight mock battles against a resident unit of experts on a 768,000-acre playing field watched over and managed by a giant supercomputer. The motto at Fort Irwin is "Death before dismount." Temperatures can cook as high as 130 and plunge below freezing at night. The swirling dust cakes on the tongue and dries up spit. Occasionally, huge migrations of tarantulas turn the desert floor into a quivering gray carpet. If the visiting soldiers are lucky, they die quickly in a hail of simulated depleted uranium.
then you could smoke em
