McQUEEN FOR A DAY

Jay Leno tells Octane what it’s like to drive the Bullitt Mustang – and why it makes him feel 18 again

STEVE McQUEEN was all guts and no glory in Bullitt. I’m more gut, and just a little glory… so to sit where he sat in this Mustang was something special. On the one hand, it’s just a ’68 Mustang that’s been flogged to death. But on the other – it’s the car.

I remember the first time I sat in a DB5 Aston Martin. You can’t help feeling like James Bond, and you smile to yourself. It’s exactly the same with this car. It’s the one that Steve McQueen drove in the movie, and you immediately become Steve McQueen. You can’t help it. You start looking behind you for Dodge Chargers and people who are trying to kill you.

Let’s be honest. This car has been thrashed. It doesn’t just drive like a 50-year-old car; it drives like a 50-yearold car that hasn’t had anything spent on it for decades. Even though it has a 390 V8, it’s not particularly fast. The tyres feel like they’re at least 20 years old – go into a corner and you start to slide and move around. But it’s fun. On Ford’s test track at Dearborn, Michigan, where we were doing some filming with the McQueen car and the 2018 Bullitt special edition Mustang, I didn’t drive it fast, but I drove it swiftly.

The owner, Sean Kiernan, was sitting with me and told me the story of how his dad bought it for $6000 in the early ’70s, which was a lot of money at the time. He got it because it was advertised as a Bullitt Mustang, but

Bullitt was misspelled and so no-one really knew what it was. Sean’s father was the only guy who called about it. That’s amazing when you think how much this car is worth now.

Even though it’s rusty and dented in places, the Mustang starts easily and it still pulls strongly. Put your foot to the floor and that V8 will hustle you along. OK, so the brakes are marginal and the handling’s the same; it tends to plough-on a little in corners. The 390 is a big, heavy motor and a 289 would handle better. But it’s like an old gun, you know: it may not be very accurate but it’s still capable of killing. This is still a powerful weapon.

The first time I put it in reverse I was reminded of that scene in the movie when McQueen backs up and the tyres go ye-ye-ye-ye-ye as the axle tramps. Bud Ekins, who was the stuntman on Bullitt, told me that they used the sound of a GT40 for the gearshifts. So the Mustang doesn’t sound as crisp as it does on the film. The mufflers are shot and it makes all kinds of noise.

I was 18 when Bullitt came out. To this day I still can’t tell you what the story was about – there was an evil police commissioner; some guy called Johnny – but it was the greatest car chase we’d ever seen, up to that point. These days, you can go on the internet and watch car chases all day long. But in ’68 you had to go to that movie. It was the only place you could see that stuff. And now, sitting in that car, it brings back memories of what you were doing when you were 18 and the movie came out.

There are certain things I remember from the film. There were, like, five hubcaps coming off, and what seemed like the world’s fastest Volkswagen: it’s in McQueen’s rear-view mirror, and then ten miles down the road at 80mph it’s still right behind him. It rivals the scene in, I think, Dr No, when Sean Connery’s driving the DB5 and looks in his mirror and sees five Koreans in a Mercedes sedan, and he can’t outrun them without spreading oil and whatever. It’s kind of funny. But it’s still a great movie. I think that movie got more kids to wear seatbelts than anything else, because when McQueen clicks in his seatbelt it makes a ‘ker-chick’ noise like a gun cocking. You know he means business.

I met Steve a few times near the end of his life. He was not in great shape by then, his face bloated from his medication, and he’d become kind of reclusive. But he was nice to me and we would talk cars. We never talked about his movies.

His old Mustang was part of my childhood, and it was part of the childhood of a lot of car guys. It still looks like he’s just parked it and walked away. And that’s cool.

Search for ‘Jay Leno’s Garage’ on YouTube to see the video of Jay driving the new and old Bullitt Mustangs.