Between hosting his own car show on CNBC and owning hundreds of the darnest things personally, Jay Leno has driven a lot of cars. In a recent Jay Leno’s Garage segment, however, Jay took a break from the pristine classics and shiny hypercars to get some seat time in something that’s just a little bit…worse. A 1986 Pontiac Fiero masquerading as a Ferrari Enzo.
If the premise sounds familiar, that might be because this car was already featured in a Car & Driver article from 2015 when it was put up for sale on eBay for $6,000. Fast forward five years and its current owner is standing beside Jay Leno, wearing matching outfits, talking about that time it was invited to The Quail at Monterey Car Week (basically an ultra-fancy car meet for ultra-fancy cars and ultra-fancy people) probably because organizers didn’t bother to check whether it was a real Ferrari Enzo or not.
“We had kind of a dream of getting this car into [The Quail] as a joke because it is trying to imitate a car that belongs at The Quail,” said owner Michael Coyne. “I assume what happened is a series of mistakes where they did not look at the photo, saw the title, and they passed off.”
Inevitably, Leno takes the world’s worst “Ferrari Enzo” out on the open road and declares its Fiero engine and underpinnings to be “not terrible”…but also “not good.”
Of course, replicas of expensive exotics based on the Fiero are nothing new. The mid-engined Pontiac has been the car of choice for folks building fake Lamborghinis and even fake Ford GT40s thanks to its mid-engined layout and low cost. It’s the automotive equivalent of your slightly out-of-shape uncle showing up to this weekend’s (outdoor, socially distant) barbeque wearing a cheap Captain America costume. The only people he’s potentially fooling are your baby cousins and even they, deep down, can kinda tell he isn’t the real Steve Rogers.
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h/t: Motor1