What happens when you have a classic car and a part gets damaged? You get a replacement, just like Jay Leno did following the November 2022 car fire that left him with “serious” third-degree burns on his face and head. “This is a brand-new ear,” Jay, 72, told Dana Carvey and David Spade on the Mar. 29 episode of the Fly on the Wall podcast. “When you get burned in a fire, ears are like paper. They’re so thin it just goes up.”
Jay also spoke about the January accident when he got knocked off his motorcycle after driving into a wire that someone hung across a lot without a warning flag/marker. “I got a broken collarbone, I got two busted ribs, and I got two cracked kneecaps ’cause I got clotheslined on my motorcycle,” he told the comedy peers. Jay joked he was “a 72-year-old guy and an 83-year-old motorcycle. What could go wrong?”
Actually, it was the November accident that resulted in Jay’s latest trip to the hospital. While driving the classic motorcycle, he noticed it was dripping gas. “I said, ‘… I don’t want to catch fire. Lemme turn around.’ I turned around in a parking lot, and the guy had a wire across a parking lot but with no flag. And the sun was right here. And boom, it just hit me. It cut my face again. So I called my face guy. I go, ‘Listen, you know that face, you gave me that new face? I gotta get it fixed.’ [He goes], ‘What’d you do?’ I told him I drove up there, and he fixed it again.”
Jay was dealing with a clogged fuel line on his 1907 White Steam Car when a leak resulted in the former Tonight Show host being sprayed with gasoline on his hands and face. “When you work with cars, you have a lot of accidents. But this is bigger than most,” he said in a December interview. “With a steam car, you have gasoline, but you also have a vaporizer which is heated by a pilot light to turn water into steam.”
While under the car, Jay got a face full of gasoline and was too close to the car’s pilot light. The gas reacted with the spark, quickly engulfing him in flames. “It felt exactly like my face was on fire. Maybe like the most intense sunburn you’ve ever had, that’d be fair to say,” he explained. “I was under the car maybe 10 seconds before [Jay’s friend, Dave Killackey] pulled me out. Any longer than that, I could have lost my eye. I’m not a panicky guy, but I knew if I breathed in, I could scorch my lungs.”
Jay was discharged from the hospital on Nov. 20, 2022. A day later, he was spotted roaming around town in a vintage blue Cadillac. His face and hands still bore damage from the incident, but he seemed to be in great spirits. Two weeks after the incident, he was performing at the Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach.