Jay Leno has driven just about everything.
But even he looked genuinely cautious behind the wheel of the 1938 Phantom Corsair.
That makes sense, because this Art Deco oddball is less “normal vintage car” and more “Batman villain escape pod.”
During his latest drive, the car reminded everyone why old concept cars are often better admired in museums than trusted on the road.
The Phantom Corsair Was Supposed To Be The Future
The Phantom Corsair was the brainchild of Rust Heinz, heir to the Heinz family fortune. Yes, that Heinz family.
He wanted to build a futuristic luxury car unlike anything else on the road, so he started with a modified 1936 Cord 810 chassis and wrapped it in a dramatic aluminum body.
It had front-wheel drive, hidden-style lighting, aircraft-inspired controls, and a cabin that looked closer to a cockpit than a normal car interior.
Back in 1938, it cost around $24,000 to build, which would be well over half a million dollars today.
It Looked Incredible, But It Wasn’t Exactly Practical
The Phantom Corsair had presence for days.
It also had terrible visibility, heavy steering, small windows, a massive front overhang, and far too much weight over the nose.
Leno described it as visually stunning, but not exactly an engineering masterpiece.
That’s the thing with dream cars. Sometimes the dream part gets finished before the usable car part does.
Then The Brakes Became The Problem
During the drive at Burbank Airport, Leno quickly discovered the Phantom Corsair didn’t have much braking power.
Actually, he said it had “no brakes for all intents and purposes.”
That’s a terrifying sentence in any car, never mind a 4,600-pound one-off from the 1930s with poor visibility and no power steering.
Thankfully, they were driving on airport grounds instead of public roads, giving Leno plenty of space to slow the car down safely. A public road would have made the situation far more dangerous.
At an airport, Leno could simply coast, downshift, and let the car bleed off speed gradually.
That’s exactly why he often tests strange, rare, or unpredictable cars in open controlled areas. When something goes wrong, there’s room to save it.
A One-Off Car With A Tragic Backstory
The Phantom Corsair never reached production.
Heinz reportedly planned to sell it for around $15,000, but those plans ended after he died in a car crash at just 25 years old.
The car later became famous through film appearances and eventually became part of the National Automobile Museum collection in Reno, Nevada.
Today, it remains one of the strangest and most fascinating American concept cars ever built.
Beautiful, But Not Exactly Confidence-Inspiring
The Phantom Corsair still looks incredible nearly 90 years later, but Leno’s drive proved something important.
Some cars are legends because they changed the world, others are legends because they look like they came from another world and barely work in this one.