The Porsche 356 started out with a really small VW Beetle-derived engine in the early 1950s, which was kept and improved over the years, and the car finally began gaining some performance from it in its later years.
However, for racing, Porsche decided that they didn’t want to use the same engine, and so they made one of their own, a twin-cam two-liter unit which put out around 130 hp – it had four cams in total, and is usually referred to as the “four-cam.”
That engine made its way into a few road-going cars (somewhere around 450 built in total), all of which were dubbed Carrera 2. Now, highly sought-after, they can fetch upward of $300,000 (€230,000), and are also considered to be the best-driving of the 356 models. We don’t know how much Jay Leno paid for his 1963 example, but it was probably a lot…
As usual, his cars always seem to have a nice story attached to them, and Jay’s Carrera 2 is no different. Check out the story after the virtual jump.
By Andrei Nedelea
VIDEO