RED & GOLD

What's the best classic bang for your buck? A fire truck, says Jay Leno, especially when it has a V12

- Mark Dixon

'So the guy who's doing the pin-striping shows up with his box of paints, and a bottle of whiskey. He takes one swig and does a whole stripe in a single pass. Then he goes around and does the other side. I come back a few hours later and he's passed out. When he wakes up, he goes home and then he comes back the next day to carry on. But just look at the job he did! It's incredible!'

You can't walk past a single vehicle in Jay Leno's garage without the man himself telling you a story about it - he knows every one intimately - and a bright-red fire engine, beautifully decorated with gold-leaf and (perfect) pinstriping, is a natural candidate. As Jay recalls with a grin: 'I pulled up next to a Ferrari at a stop light, and there was a small boy crossing with his mother, and she pointed out the Ferrari and he went "Wow, a fire truck!"

The story of how Jay discovered this 1941 American LaFrance fire truck is pretty remarkable, too. 'When the truck had outlived its usefulness maybe 30 years ago, it was parked at the end of the runway at Burbank Airport as a kind of windbreak, to stop dirt and trash blowing across the runway. But then 9/11 happened and you weren't allowed to have anything near a runway that people could hide behind. I saw it about to be hitched to a tow truck and said, "Where are you going with that thing?" "I'm taking it to the scrapyard." "I'll pay you double whatever the scrap value is!" It was nothing, a couple of hundred bucks. And it only had 11,000 miles on it!'