Jay Leno Drives the Coolest Old Car … Ever?

After reading that headline, you may have wondered if we have fallen victim to hyperbole — or bad imitations of Jeremy Clarkson, one of the most recognizable automotive journalists … in the world. But no—we wrote that with great conviction, because the latest episode of Jay Leno’s Garage features the Thomas Flyer that won the 1908 race from New York to Paris and changed the way the world looked at the automobile. Yes, the very car. Of course, Jay Leno gets to drive it.

For 1908, the New York Times and the Le Matin newspapers organized a newspaper man’s dream: They set what popular opinion believed was an impossible task. They didn’t doubt whether humans could do it; the first people to sail around the world did so in 1519. But proponents of the automobile were making such an incredible din about these horseless carriages. How could anything so unreliable and complicated and expensive improve upon the horse, a form of transportation that humans had been using for centuries? Could it even survive winter?

The teams that entered the race represented their countries as much as (if not more than) the companies that built their cars. At first, it seemed as though America would go without a representative—no one wanted their brand to go down in history as the idiots who thought their rich-people toys could replace the horse. Transportation preferences aside, President Theodore Roosevelt would brook no such cowardice, and he found his champion in Edwin Ross Thomas, head of E. R. Thomas Company of Buffalo, New York. He was willing (and rich enough) to take a chance for the sake of publicity.

The company’s chief mechanic, George Schuster, got exactly 24 hours notice. He showed up in New York City on February 12, 1908 to find his five competitors in a crowd of 250,000 people. Schuster’s team’s steed was a freshly built, 1907 model year Thomas Flyer, a 5000-pound beast that cost as much as a house … several times over. Its 571-cubic-inch, T-head inline-four put out 70 hp and could propel the two-row, roofless automobile to nearly 70 mph. Keep in mind that the Wright Brothers had only flown successfully a few years before, in 1903. The Flyer was heady stuff.

Montague Roberts, the official driver, along with Schuster the mechanic, and a journalist in the back seat, drove west, in a blinding blizzard, from New York City to Albany to Chicago. The original route had them crossing into Russia on the frozen Bering Straits, but that didn’t go according to plan—the snow was too deep, and the cars had to be shipped across by boat. From Alaska, they went to Japan, then to Vladivostok, Omsk, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, on their way to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. On a good day, Schuster and Roberts would drive from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., work on the car till midnight, then go to sleep—in a bed if they were lucky—and do it all over the next day. In the end, they traveled over 22,000 miles in 169 days, averaging 157 miles a day.

The journalist rode in the back seat, writing a story every day and sending it in, sometimes by carrier pigeon. At one point, a pigeon flew the wrong way and collided with one of the headlights, rendering both light and bird useless. The team had to keep constant watch for bandits, who had heard about the event and knew big money was behind it—if the Americans or any other team were captured, the ransom would surely be rich.

“Most of the world never saw a car until they saw the Thomas Flyer,” says Phil MacDougall, president of the National Automobile Museum, in Reno, Nevada. Wherever they went, the competitors were guaranteed a reaction. Adoring fans scratched their initials into the car’s body. The less adoring ordered the team to stay off their property, lest the car send their animals into a panic.

Schuster and Roberts could see the Eiffel Tower when they were stopped by a policemen, who pointed to the broken headlight and threatened to arrest them, per the current regulations that mandated two functioning headlights for an automobile. A bystander, overhearing Schuster’s desperate pleas with the officer, volunteered the lamp on his bicycle. Schuster strapped the light—still attached to the bicycle—onto the giant hood of the Flyer, and drove across the finish line, victorious.

Fast forward to modern times with Leno behind the wheel, and you can plainly see he loves the Flyer. “You can pull a truck with this thing!” he crows, barreling down the runway of an airport near his home garage, MacDougall riding shotgun. You can tell Leno’s absorbed in the task of driving because he doesn’t talk as much as he usually does in the driving sections of these episodes—but then again, most vehicles are quieter than the Thomas Flyer. Leno even wore a watch from 1921 that was designed for drivers to wear on the insides of their wrists. You can watch the video to see why.

It’s amazing to see this machine on the road, but the story of what it accomplished in the hands of some very determined people is even more impressive. It’s no wonder that the Hagerty Drivers Foundation made this the 14th automobile added to the National Historic Vehicle Register. Next time you’re in Reno, stop by the museum and see it—and if a trip isn’t in your future, do the next best thing and watch the video below!