driving a car with a 15.8-ft. wheelbase and an engine with a 16-gal. crankcase. Read more: Leno's Tank Car Gets an Upgrade: Jay Leno's Garage - Popular Mechanics

Some days, a man has to make a statement by driving a car with a 15.8-ft. wheelbase and an engine with a 16-gal. crankcase.

Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show and PM Contributing Editor (Photo: Matthew Welch/Icon)

A few years ago, I bought an M-47 Patton tank-engine car. Any way you look at it, this thing is a monster. Its wheelbase is more than 15 ft. The engine is a 30-liter V12 -- each of those 12 cylinders is bigger than a four-cylinder Toyota engine -- and it had between 800 and 900 hp. But given that the car weighs 10,000 pounds and that I live in a hilly area, the Patton's engine performance was, to quote the old Rolls-Royce ads, "adequate."

The car needed more oomph to get up those hills. Besides, gas mileage wasn't too good, either. The engine was fed by two huge Stromberg carburetors with needle jets that looked like arrowheads. And the carbs weren't efficient. If I didn't shut down the car when I was at a filling station, the idling engine sucked gas out of the tank faster than I could pump it in.

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