Leno flogs car-care products for classics

Jay Leno hosted a group of gear heads at his Burbank garage recently. He wanted to show off the cream of his car and motorcycle collection, and to hawk new products.

Called Jay Leno’s Advanced Vehicle Care, it’s the first branded retail product line to emerge from Leno’s passion for vintage vehicles, and from his long-running Jay Leno’s Garage TV and Internet series.

The car collector, comedian and former late-night TV host spent two hours leading a small audience around the massive compound, which sits just off a Hollywood Burbank Airport runway.

Here was his favourite car, a McLaren F1 British racer. There was his oldest, a Stanley steamdriven car from 1906.

In another room is an assembly of Brough Superior motorcycles — more than a dozen of them — that in the 1920s were the world’s most desirable twowheeled machines. (That’s what T.E. Lawrence was riding when a crash cost him his life.)

“It’s like having every girl you ever went out with in high school, all in the same room,” Leno said of his collection, which consists of cars and motorcycles kept in constant readiness to drive and ride. “And they all look the same, and they’ll always look the same.”

Leno said he’d long resisted putting his name on car care products. But after spending 10 years developing this line of polishers, rubs and waxes, he said, he thought he might have made a mistake.

“The right way to do this is find a company and have them give you a big cheque to endorse their product,” Leno said. “Then there’s the stupid way. That’s what we did.”

Leno worked mostly with Jeremy Porrazzo, who for more than a decade had been Leno’s car cleaning specialist.

Years before, Porrazzo had offered to come into Leno’s garage during his spare time, to polish and clean Leno’s collection of 160 cars and 130 motorcycles — for free.

He was hoping the car legend would help him launch a brand of car cleaning products.

Two years later, Leno offered him the official car-polishing gig. When the former TV host began asking Porrazzo how he made his cleaning compounds, the new company was born.

The line is composed of 14 vehicle-care products, with another six on the way, said the company’s marketing director, Chris Walters.

Unlike similar lines, these are colour-coded, inside the bottles as well as on the labels — orange for quick detailing, blue for hand wax, red for vehicle wash — for easy identification. All the formulas and mix designs were developed in-house.

Available online only via Leno’s “Garage” website, the products range in price from $9.99 to $17.99 US a bottle.

Leno’s favourite? “The metal polish,” Porrazzo said. “He goes through a half-gallon of it at a time.”

Leno joked that the products are offered with very little markup, “which is the other stupid way to do it.”