Backmarker: Working so hard it’s not funny

July 29, 2010 by Mark Gardiner
Filed under Backmarker

Back in the days when the Yamaha FZR600 was fast, I crashed at Shannonville, in Ontario. I was going pretty fast; it was the classic sky-ground-sky-ground-sky-ground deal.

Yamaha's racing manager Keith McCarty is also a heck of a good cook. Luckily, Jay's garage has a full commercial kitchen, where McCarty put his race crew and whole family to work preparing hors d'oeuvres, lasagna, and steaks for 140. Here, his indefatigable mom does a number on about twenty pounds of zucchini. “I thought I retired about sixteen years ago,” she quipped. • Gardiner photo

I bounced and tumbled so far that the ladies in the control tower told me that they’d scrambled the ambulance, and they even claimed it started moving before I stopped moving. “I don’t know how you guys ever walk away from those things!” one of them said. The thing I remember most vividly about it was that it went on for so long that I actually had time to wonder, “Is this just my new reality? Maybe this is never going to stop.”

That’s the kind of month I just had.

Seriously. I know some of the tire marks on my body are the result of my own stupidity, but I’ve been thrown under the bus so often lately that when I come to a bus stop, instead of standing on the sidewalk to wait for it, I lie down in the street.

At least I got to breathe one sigh of relief the Tuesday before MotoGP, when Yamaha’s soiree at Jay Leno’s garage came off without a hitch—the first thing that had gone according to plan for me all month. I was stressed about it because I’d acted as a go-between with Yamaha and Jay. So although all the actual work of putting it on was handled by Bob Starr, with logistics (and even cooking!) by the super-prepared Keith McCarty, assisted by his whole family, including his amazing mom, I felt responsible—at least for assuring that Jay had a good time.

Garage manager Bernard Juchli made sure that Wayne Rainey and the king signed his toolbox. They're in good company: Agostini's on there too. • Gardiner photo

The day began with a busload of Yamahanians, including Jorge Lorenzo, arriving at the garage just in time to be transferred to the NBC studios to watch Jay tape The Tonight Show. This is entertaining for me partly because I like Jay and enjoy cheering him on, but mainly because I’m in awe of the intensity of the live-to-tape production. Although the show’s taped several hours before it’s aired, it’s all done in real time, with the set changes made during the two- or three-minute commercial breaks.

Starr had correctly pegged the subject of that day’s monologue as Lindsay Lohan’s trip to jail. After the monologue and in each subsequent break, all hell breaks loose on the set, with people running in and out changing props, the cue card guy quickly going through the next set of cues with Jay, and another key assistant going over other absolute last-minute changes to the show and script. Meanwhile, the new band keeps the crowd rocking out.

Jay rolls up his sleeves before firing up one of his several enormous steam engines. Some of his huge, 100-plus-year-old machines not only work, but are put to work. Soon one of them, powered by natural gas, will turn an electric generator. The shop's already got a huge solar array on the roof. Although in one sense, Jay's got a carbon footprint bigger than his chin, he argues that he's also embodying the notion of “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” He says, “I'm still using cars that were built a hundred years ago. If that's not conservation, what is?” • Gardiiner photo

With about thirty seconds to go, some guy walks over to the band leader and holds his wrists crossed over his head, in a signal not unlike a corner worker calling for an ambulance. Then with a few seconds to go, he signals for the band to bring the break music to a close, the set’s cleared, and Jay launches into the next bit. It’s really, really intense even watching it, and it’s a marvel that the host is never, ever rattled—or if he is, it sure doesn’t show. Picture a MotoGP rider crashing early in qualifying, and having his crew frantically prepare his backup machine in a mad thrash complete with the occasional thrown wrench and cursing, then having the rider climb on the machine, pure composure and concentration, and put in a fast lap with no room for error.

Layer in the pressure on him from above. When NBC shuffled Jay and O’Brien, it was portrayed as nothing less than the future (and perhaps the death of) NBC and maybe even mainstream television. Then when they put Jay back behind the Tonight Show desk, he was excoriated in the press. It was interesting last week to see the subtle changes made to the show, which is in fact a lot fresher. The guest band was hip—the Black Keys—and Zac Efron was on the set for virtually the whole show, much to the delight of the young women in the audience. So it’s, like, Yeah… save the network from itself while knowing that across the Southland, jealous comedians will pick every monologue joke apart tomorrow morning over coffee.

"They called me and asked, 'Can we bring a few racers to the garage for dinner'," Jay said as he looked out over a crowd that had grown to well over 100 people, including a Dorna video crew. Then he patted the bike and delivered the laugh line: "I should do this more often." • Gardiner photo

The show we watched being taped was number three thousand, eight hundred and something. It was all in a day’s work.

Whenever I spend any time with Jay, I realize that virtually everyone around him wants a piece of him, that there’s always someone nearby with a clipboard and something that needs attention—often so urgently they’re actually looking at a stopwatch. I come away realizing that as cool as it must be to be rich and famous, and to be able to buy all the cool toys he wants, I wouldn’t trade lives.

Notwithstanding the 100-plus bikes and an equal number of great cars and the shop facility where Jay and his staff can actually build a jet car in-house, the garage is really his sanctuary—a place where he can go and decompress for a few hours after taping the show. He hangs with the half-dozen or so guys who work for him full-time, checks on the progress of various projects, and if things are going his way, spins a few wrenches safe in the knowledge that behind the locked gates, he won’t be disturbed. That’s why it was so generous of Jay to host us.

Garage regular John Pera brought one of his own bikes over for the evening. It made an interesting comparison between GP bikes of different eras. “It's a good thing you guys came,” one garage employee told me. “It forced us to finally clean this place up!” • Gardiner photo

Last fall, Jay auctioned off a Star V-Max to benefit Bailey’s Café, and that left him without a single Yamaha in the garage. It seemed wrong to Yamaha that Jay would never show up at the Rock Store on one of their bikes. That, after all, was a PR opportunity going to waste, and anyway, Jay’s been a great ambassador for American motorcycling for ages (he was inducted into the AMA Hall of Fame in 2000). In the last year or so, he’s generated a lot of positive press for Yamaha, to say nothing of well over $100k for a worthwhile charity that he and Yamaha (and my wife and I) support. A suitable thank-you was in order.

The question for Bob Starr and his cronies was, what do you give a guy who can easily buy anything he wants, already attracts attention wherever he goes, and is frequently seen on amazing bikes? The “now that’s cool” bar was set pretty high.

Their answer was to pull an ex-Eric Bostrom superbike out of the warehouse. Jay’s not a track guy. “I think it’s sad when you see some old guy, his leathers too tight, who thinks that because he’s good at one thing, that made him rich, he must be good at racing,” he once told me, adding, “Racers are athletes. I once read that Stirling Moss could read a newspaper at twenty feet. I tried it and at twenty feet I couldn’t even see the paper.” So he wouldn’t want, or use, a track-day bike. That meant sending it to Chuck Graves with instructions to do the bare minimum that would leave the machine capable of being ridden on the street.

Graves replaced E-Boz’s Magneti Marelli ECU with one that would allow the bike to run reliably at lower rpm, swapped the dash for one with a speedo, and made sure the charging system would keep the battery topped up for longer than a twent-five-lap race. The rest of the bike was left intact. Graves told me, “Since this bike was built before we were homologating parts [as per the current DMG-era rules], if you wanted to reproduce it you’d have to build a lot of the parts.” I guess Leno’s done enough favors for the local constabulary that he can get away with riding it sans lights or treaded tires.

Future teammates? Spies seemed preoccupied—perhaps already slipping into race mode, and feeling the pressure of a home GP (as well as the pain of a recent crash). Lorenzo was quiet but comes across as an okay guy with (my wife was quick to note) a great smile. • Gardiner photo

All in all, the bike’s a pretty cool addition to his garage, and it was a nice touch to spring it on him; he had no idea he was getting it when he agreed to the evening. He also got custom Alpinestars leathers that match the bike, and a way cool helmet, painted by Troy Lee himself, which had elements of the paint jobs used by Lorenzo, Spies and Edwards, as well as Kenny Roberts Sr., Eddie Lawson, and Wayne Rainey—all of whom were there and signed it for him.

After dinner, Jay was, as always, the opposite of Hollywood. He stood around, posing for the same photo, taken over and over and over, but with different people. A couple of times, when he needed a break, he grabbed one person he knew and said, “C’mere, I want to show you something,” and walked way to the back of the garage, where he unlocked a door into two more huge empty rooms—an addition he’s in the process of building. After a few minutes’ respite, he went back out to work the crowd. Instead of “Okay, no more photos,” he was available until absolutely everyone had the pics they wanted. As the last person stood in for a photo and thanked him, he said, “No problem, thank you for coming.”

Finally, we went back to our homes and hotels, and Keith McCarty and his crew cleaned up Jay’s kitchen and loaded the tables and chairs back into Yamaha’s hauler.

Jay went home to work on the next day’s monologue.