It feels like such a much bigger engine. It's so funny, doesn't it?
Well, maybe that's the 3 L situation.
Yeah. Yeah, that's what it is.
It's very nimble. I feel like when you change lanes, it's like zip. You just zip through it.
Yeah.
It's like you're in a movie now with this.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I know. All my other classic cars, road cars, this one definitely drives the best.
Yeah. Drives the best. And I just, it's just amazing. It's just really well done.
Oh yeah. Plenty of power. Yeah.
One episode of Jay Leno's Garage. A little bit of automotive royalty here. The Ferrari California Spider, the 250. The 250 stands for 2.5 L, but this is one of the last cars. So, this has the bigger 3 L motor and V12 and about 170 horsepower, which seems like nothing nowadays, but when you drive it, it's light, it's nimble. You'll see when I was a kid, I thought these V12s were big. You know, I didn't really understand liters versus cubic inches. And then when I would do the math eventually, I go, 'God, that's not that big at all.' But extremely efficient for what they do. Um, you probably saw a replica of this in the Ferris Bueller's Day Off movie. That was, yeah, rolls out of the garage. Yeah. Which is crazy. But yeah, but this is, that's kind of what made this car famous. Much like the DeLorean got famous from Back to the Future. Uh, this one belongs to our good friend David Lee. Uh, he just got it recently. And you know, unfortunately when you buy a Ferrari, you do not get socks with the car. So, you have to buy those separately. And apparently, he was unable to get to Target today. David Lee, Ferrari collector. [laughter] That's just...
Hey, Jay. How you doing, buddy?
Good to see you, my friend. Oh, well, this is a beauty. Another, you scored another hit here. This is great.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm so, this is my dream car. I mean, ever since I saw the movie when I was in high school at my friend's birthday party, and it was great. Of course, that was a replica back then. Um, but this is the real deal and I couldn't believe I got it. So, you're going to try and push it into the woods the same way. [laughter]
Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. This is, you know, this is my favorite era of Ferrari, the early to mid-60s, that just always seem the sexiest because they were so unlike American cars, you know. There's never been a bad-looking Ferrari really. They always look great, but there's something about this. The short wheelbase, it just seems, I don't know. Look, don't do whatever the movie is, you know. Yeah, it's really a good-looking car and they were front engine. Ferrari was pretty, you know, Ferrari got his idea for the V12 from Packard when he was a young man during World War I. The Packard V12s were used in Europe and he just thought that was, wow, V12. Most cars were single cylinder or two-cylinder even. So that's where that came from. So he liked the American stuff. Engine in the front, transmission in the middle, drum brakes, disc came very late to Ferrari. Very traditional, dependable. I want to win races. What do we got to do? You know, and so it's also my favorite era and the best-looking wire wheels with the knockoff. Yeah. Just an all-around, there's really no bad lines on this. And you see how many other cars, Mustang, everybody else put this sort of... Who did this? Is this, um...
Pininfarina. That's right. Okay. The classic wood steering. You know, it's all so simple. It's like everything that was in a Fiat but at a higher level. High... No, I don't mean, I'm not trying to be insulting. I mean, but the chrome's a little deeper.
The gauge is a little bit more legible, a little bit big. I mean, it just, everything works. You know, when you look at, when you're driving, you look, you can see, you know, modern cars have so many things that are digital and you have these kind of things that look aircraft, but it's hard to read them, you know. Whereas this, you can tell at a glance where everything is by the red needle. Now, this is a five-speed, correct?
Uh, no, it's a four-speed.
Oh, it is a four-speed. Okay.
Well, '63 was a long time ago. [laughter]
I mean, it was... it was... Yeah. Yeah.
I just assumed it was a five-speed. Okay. Yeah.
So, it's a four-speed, huh? It's a four-speed and about like you said 179 horsepower, but it's just got that Ferrari, the red, and like the red little sports car, right? Back then was probably quite rare, right, to have the red little sports car.
Well, when I worked for a place called Foreign Motors in Boston and we took one in for about, we gave the guy 5,200 and we sold it for 7,500 and my boss thought the salesman was a genius. He couldn't believe he got that much money for this foreign car. I mean, Ferrari was a storied name even then. It was just beginning, but it was still a secondhand car.
I mean, nowadays they'd trade you a half a dozen new Mercedes for a Ferrari, but back then... No, no, it wasn't.
In fact, this car was probably $14,000 new, I would guess. Something like that.
Something like that. Yeah.
Yeah, that's about right.
But that wasn't that a lot of money back then.
That was a lot of... Yeah. My parents paid 19 for the house, you know. So...
Wow. That's almost a house, huh?
It's almost like a house, you know.
Yeah. That's... [laughter] And it's still the same. You could get a beautiful house in Beverly Hills for the price of this. You got a half a dozen beautiful houses in Beverly Hills. [laughter] How many previous owners do you know? Do you know the history?
Um, yeah, I do. This is great. I mean, this car is one of the last California Spiders made, which is very nice. It has the classic K from Ferrari, so everything's matching and legit. It has the Massini report, so it knows all the history. I think maybe there was like five owners before that. Okay. Uh, it's been kind of a Bay Area car. It was new and delivered to California. So, it's certainly a real California car. It's been up in the Bay Area basically all of its life. And you know, now it's in Southern California with me.
Can we open the hood? Let's open.
Yeah. Okay. Let me grab it over there.
Wow, look at that. Just... It's so funny because when I was a kid, this seemed like the most complicated. Now it looks so simple. The three carburetors, your ignition coils, distributors are right here.
The twin oil filters are right there.
I'm not sure how you get those oil filters off without dripping oil over. I mean, you're pulling it up, it just comes out the bottom, right?
And it's so funny when you realize this is a 3 L version as you said, but 2.5, which is... which is nothing, [laughter] right? Right.
How many... What is that? 140 cubic inches or something like that. Sure. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but these did seem so big because of the noise they made.
You know, you look at the engine, it's long and... Okay.
Right. You'd think it was as big as a Chrysler 440 or [laughter] something, but no, not at all.
But you're right, Jay. Like, you know, like you said, 179 horsepower, when I was driving here from Walnut to come here, even though it wasn't as fast as our modern cars, but it's still fun and seemed kind of fast. I mean, for being in the car, it seemed kind of fast. The sound certainly sounded fast.
Yeah. Well, that's what I mean. You get the, you know, that's the thing. You know, I drove one of those. I think it was the Rimac electric sports car. It was like, you know, $2.5 million. And at that point it was the fastest accelerating model.
But it just... I mean it was fast. I mean faster than fast. Crazy fast. What is the... I mean at 60 you're kind of like, it's almost like the ignition's off and you're just rolling down the highway because you hear thump thump. You don't hear an engine. You hear the tire bumps and there was no... It didn't have a soul like this, you know. This thing makes all the noises. Yeah. But yeah, it's just fantastic.
Yeah. Exactly. So, it's just wonderful. Like you say, all the gauges, you know, you look at them, they actually work. It's, you know, you got to... it's manual shift. Yeah. But it drives great. I, you know, I have the other classic Ferraris. I brought them here even before, but this, you know, the short wheelbase, I was always wondering why is this so much more expensive than the other, you know, classic Ferraris.
And I realized after driving this that it does drive better. It drives better. It reacts better. You can maneuver through lanes better. It's like a go-kart.
It's a small, light car with no... you know, now everybody brags about driver aids not being in the car. But this didn't... they didn't exist when this thing was built.
Yeah. No, it did not. Everything's new.
Everything's nicely weighted and... and everything's metal, you know, like the housing around the traffic indicators. It's not plastic. It's chrome. It's, you know, it's really... Boy, it's nicely done.
No headrest. It's funny to see a car without headrest, but...
But it looks better this way. When I see these kind of cars and somebody put headrests on, it just looks...
Yeah. This is considered, I think, by many, many people in the Ferrari community as the best road car in design and in performance that they ever did. Of course, for the '60s and '70s and that era, but it's really the ultimate road car.
I used to love the 330 GTC.
Yeah. Because it sort of had that Mustang proportions, long hood, short, you know. Yeah. Just fantastic.
Well, this thing, I can't wait to drive.
Yeah, sure thing. Let's do it, Jay.
All right.
And just the right size, too.
It sounds like a Ferrari.
It feels like such a much bigger engine. It's so funny, doesn't it?
Well, maybe that's the 3 L situation.
Yeah. Yeah, that's what it is.
The shifter is very nice.
Boy, this has plenty of power.
That's what I was saying. It feels fast.
And like you said, it's not that big of a horsepower, but it just feels so fast in this car.
I mean, that was a lot of horsepower. You know, I've got that '62 Maserati.
And I have the original road test from Road and Track.
And it's got fuel injection. And it said, the article begins, 'Why anyone needs 220 horsepower in a car...'
'...is beyond us, but we'll take it.' You know, it's kind of cool.
I mean, so that was a lot then.
Yeah.
I mean, back in those days, very, very few cars could go 0 to 60 in under 10 seconds. [laughter] That was like a really fast time.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
But when it's really tight, the steering is right. It's very nimble. So, I feel like when you change lanes, it's like zip. You just zip through it.
I'm also happily delighted that I bought a car from auction. I bring it back and, you know, it runs good, too. It's not like I got to do a whole thing.
Yeah. Mostly a lot of auction cars.
Yeah.
But did you remember this car back then though? I mean, when it first came out?
I remember it. Yeah. Because that's the age when you're just getting interested in cars and this stuff is just made of unobtanium. Unobtanium, you know? You just...
But was it like in Hollywood, it was a big deal too? Like people in Hollywood, they thought this was a sexy car.
This would have been a movie star car.
Yeah. Yeah, I know. All my other classic cars, road cars, this one definitely drives the best.
Yeah. Drives the best. And I just, it's just amazing. It's just really well done.
Do you think back then they took some of the Grand Prix cars' technology and brought it into the road car, or not really, that was separate?
I think Ferrari just did what he had to do to sell cars to raise money.
You know, I don't mean it in the bad way. I just mean...
He wasn't really interested in it, right?
And if you're somebody that complained, he didn't care if he lost you as a customer.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like all the old fonts on the gauges.
The good thing, this is a convertible, so you feel a lot more air. The other, my other one, the 250, that's a coupe, feels so hot, you know, the air is trapped in there.
Like at least here you feel like the air is circulating.
