Background on the Jay Leno tank car
If you had a vehicle the size of the Chrysler building powered by a Korean-War-era M47 Patton tank engine—a 2000-pound, 1790 cubic-inch V-12 air-cooled Chrysler-built beast that makes 810 hp and 1560 lb-ft torque, and has an Allison tranny from a Greyhound bus—what’s the first thing you would do? Well, Jay Leno did what any sane person would: he called Gale Banks to give it even more power.
“There’s two things Jay wants in a car,” says Banks: “a loud horn and huge power.” So Gale and his team went to work on twin-turbocharging the tank car’s gargantuan air-cooled engine. But getting the goods to turbocharge a tank engine from half a century ago isn’t as simple as stopping in at Pep Boys. The Banks crew had to build many of the parts themselves, from mongo slabs of billet aluminum. Gale called his friends at the Robert Bosch company and asked them to convert the engine to fuel injection. The turbos were sourced from Honeywell/Garrett Turbo Technologies and are magnesium-housing units originally used for Toyota’s CART efforts. They don’t sell them, officially, but if they did you’d pay close to $10,000 per copy.
Watch Jay Leno's infamous "tank car" in the race shop at Gale Banks Engineering.
The Korean-War-era M47 Patton tank engine had 810 hp when it came to Banks --
it left with 1600 hp (and according to Jay, the fuel economy is even better).
