Damage to left side of face. No injury to ears or eyes. Get well soon, Jay!
Er… wow. That leads to interesting questions, like… did one of the steam cars blow up? Or something else? In the past he’s singed off arm hair and stuff like that, but this sounds more serious. Hope he recovers soon and completely.
The article said it was a fire. He expects to be back on his feet in a week or two, so that is good news
Must have been working on a Pinto.
Or the aptly-named Fiero.
The linked article has this quote from Jay Leno: “I got some serious burns from a gasoline fire."
Bwahahahahahaha. Sorry, hope Jay recovers soon
I’ve now heard a report that the gasoline that caused the burn came from the fuel tank of a steam car.
But he took it on the chin.
And with his chin, he can take a lot.
This article says he was working on a steam car, as @Broomstick guessed above.
“It was a steam car,” Swift said. “Steam is made by gas and he got sprayed with some gas and it ignited.”
And
“The report claims the fire burned the left side of the comedian’s face, but did not penetrate his eye or ear. The Burbank Fire Department confirmed to Road & Track it responded to an emergency medical call at Leno’s garage on Saturday where it assessed and treated one adult male patient.”
Fortunately, it sounds like he’ll be okay.
If he starts obsessively flipping a coin, back away…
Jay was clearing a clogged fuel line and got sprayed wirh gas. Unfortunately a spark ignited the gas.
I’ve been sprayed with oil and gas seceral times working on tractors and cars. It’s usually not a big deal except you stink of gas until a shower.
Never know when a spark will ignite gas fumes. Mythbusters did several episodes and it always took multiple tries before getting the right mix of gas fumes and oxygen.
Sure glad it wasn’t worse. He’ll be in a lot of pain for awhile. Burns are always miserable while they heal.
I’ve always appreciated Jays commitment to restoring and driving vintage cars. Jay has several mechanics that work in his shop full time. They even have a machine shop to make parts for restoration. Jay works on the cars too.
No, it was a Renault Fuego.
This, to me, is pretty neat. He doesn’t just pay someone else to do the work for him and then parades around showing off someone else’s hard work. Jay does a lot of the work himself so has some serious personal buy-in with the cars he has.
I remember an old episode of Home Improvement where Tim loses a race to Bob Vila. Both men were driving cars that they had restored and Vila beat Tim to the finish line. Tim says afterword that he lost on purpose because he knew what his car was capable of he had restored it himself and didn’t want to push it past its limit – unlike Vila who had someone else build his car and wouldn’t care if he blew the engine as he’d just pay someone to rebuild it. It’s nice to see Jay take the Tim Taylor approach.
I hope he recovers quickly.
Cars have been a big part of Jays life. He made time to work in the garage when he was busy with the Tonight Show.
Yes it’s very cool that he works on his cars. But he has so many of them that I’m guessing he has mechanics to do some if not much of the work. And he might also employ drivers to drive his cars once in a while.
Just a guess on my part. I love his shows and I really like that he’s a down to earth guy. I love it when someone who’s made it big remember his roots.
I hope he recovers without lingering / lasting effects.
I know he employs mechanics. They do full restorations on cars that need it. Apparently Jay enjoys making small repairs. Gets his hands dirty.
There’s video of Jays shop and his equipment. It’s pretty cool they can machine parts that aren’t available anymore. They use a Waterjet and CAD. You draw or scan the part in CAD and the Waterjet cuts it out of a block of metal.
Yeah, the steam-era cars were always fiddly and problematic - which is a major reason we don’t build steam-powered cars any more. Some of the later ones (1920’s) were probably safer but some of the earlier ones were just downright exciting to drive. There are some videos on line done by Leno about those cars and in at least one of them the wood body of the car caught fire going down the street and he had to pull over to put the fire out.
Best wishes for everyone affected, especially Jay Leno, and hope he recovers quickly and uneventfully.
Was it really gasoline that sprayed on him? I thought gasoline was used exclusively by internal combustion engines, and steamers used other liquid fuels.
Kerosene was popular for steam cars, but a lot of then ran on gasoline. Since a steam car is an external combustion engine, a lot of them weren’t all that picky about their fuel. If it was liquid and could flow through the fuel system, and it burned, that was good enough.
Does anyone know what type of car this was? I know Jay has at least one Stanley Steamer (probably more than one). Some of the earlier Stanleys had two different fuel tanks, a gasoline tank for the pilot light and a kerosene tank for the main fuel. You’d light the burners from the gasoline, then switch over to kerosene once the burners were up to temperature. Later Stanleys were intended to be used with gasoline only. I don’t know how well they would run off of kerosene or some other fuel like alchohol.
Most other steam cars could run off of gasoline or kerosene, and didn’t really care which one you used.