Jay Leno had one thing left on his automotive bucket list: a ride in the Hurst Hemi Under Glass with legendary stunt driver Bob Riggle at the controls. What happened on that run turned a routine exhibition into one of the most-watched clips in Jay Leno’s Garage history, with nearly eight million views and a comment section full of people who could not believe what they had just watched. Watch the video and see for yourself.
There are bucket-list items, and then there are the ones your friends quietly try to talk you out of. Riding shotgun in a wheelstanding exhibition drag car with 2,500 horsepower behind your head, driven by a man who has been doing this since the Johnson administration, falls squarely into the second category. Jay Leno decided to do it anyway, cameras rolling, for a premiere episode of Jay Leno’s Garage. The run started exactly the way everyone expected, front wheels reaching for the sky, crowd noise swelling. Then it stopped being the run everyone expected, and the footage became one of the most replayed clips the show has ever produced.
Hurst’s Wheelstanding Barracuda: A Car Built to Defy Physics
The car at the center of it is the Hurst Hemi Under Glass, a series of exhibition drag racing machines campaigned by Hurst Performance from 1965 through 1975. The concept was gloriously simple and structurally insane: take a Plymouth Barracuda, move the Hemi engine rearward into the space behind the front seats where the rear passengers used to live, and let the resulting weight transfer do something no ordinary drag car could. Instead of launching flat, it stands up. The name comes from the fact that on the original cars you could see the engine through the Barracuda’s enormous fastback rear glass. Hurst developed the concept with help from well-known wheelstander Wild Bill Shrewsberry, and a new car was built around the current-year Barracuda body.
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Bob Riggle and the Longest Career in Exhibition Racing
Bob Riggle is the other half of the story, and arguably the more remarkable one. The Mansfield, Ohio driver took the wheel of the Hemi Under Glass and made it his life’s work, then came back to exhibition racing in 1992 with a replica of the 1968 car after the original run ended. That means a career of driving a vehicle that spends most of its quarter-mile with the front wheels several feet off the ground, steering by throttle and by feel, with the visual reference of the track disappearing entirely under the nose of the car. Riggle’s reputation is not built on a single stunt. It is built on doing an extraordinarily difficult thing repeatedly, for decades, without drama.
What 2,500 Horsepower Feels Like From the Passenger Seat
The video, published on the Jay Leno’s Garage channel, sets the ride up straightforwardly: Leno finds out what true power feels like riding in the 2,500-horsepower Hemi Under Glass with Riggle at the controls, promoted as a preview of a premiere episode airing on CNBC. What the description does not prepare you for is the sensory reality of the thing. This is not a car with a power figure you appreciate intellectually. It is a car that removes the horizon from your field of view and replaces it with sky, while everything behind you is trying to shake itself apart. The clip has accumulated nearly eight million views, and a substantial share of those are people watching it a second and third time.
The Moment the Wheelie Becomes Something Else
About halfway down the track, the wheelstand becomes something else. The car gets away from its driver and rolls, and the camera stays with it. What separates this footage from the endless supply of crash compilations online is what happens immediately afterward. Both men climb out. Riggle’s reaction, captured on the audio, is a flat, resigned expletive delivered with the tone of a man who has just spilled a cup of coffee rather than rolled a race car, which tells you everything about how many times he has been closer to the edge than the audience realized. The response of the safety crew, the composure of both men, and the complete absence of panic is genuinely striking.
“Is the Engine Okay?” and Other Things Only a Car Guy Says
Then Leno does the most Leno thing imaginable and asks whether the engine is okay. Viewers seized on that moment, and rightly so. Somewhere in the ranking of concerns after rolling a wheelstander at speed, the health of the powerplant should probably not be first, and the fact that it was for him is the purest expression of car-guy priorities anyone has captured on video. He follows it up by cracking a joke with the track safety official. The comment section has spent years pointing out that the man’s first instinct after a serious incident was comedy, which, given his day job, is either reassuring or alarming depending on your perspective.
Why Viewers Praised the Title They Didn’t Get
The other thing viewers latched onto is what the video did not do. The title makes no mention of the rollover. In an era where every thumbnail is engineered to promise catastrophe, Jay Leno’s Garage published the clip under a straight description of the ride and let the footage speak. Commenters called it out repeatedly as a mark of respect, both for the audience and for Riggle, whose car and whose reputation were on the line. That restraint is probably part of why the clip aged so well. People trust it, and they send it to friends without a warning label attached.
The Engineering That Makes a Wheelstander Survivable
The survivability of the incident is not an accident either, and it is worth understanding. Exhibition wheelstanders carry serious roll cage structure, harness systems, and fire suppression precisely because the entire operating premise involves attitudes no production car was designed to hold. That engineering is the reason two men well past normal racing age walked away from a rollover in a purpose-built drag car and were talking about the engine within seconds.
Where the Hemi Under Glass Legend Stands Today
As for the legend itself, the Hemi Under Glass occupies an odd and enduring place in drag racing history. It was never a class competitor and it never chased an elapsed time. Its entire function was to make a grandstand look up instead of forward, which is a completely different job than winning a round, and it is a job the car did better than almost anything built before or since. The Barracuda body kept the concept tied to a recognizable production car, the mid-mounted Hemi gave it the physics to stand up, and Riggle gave it four decades of continuity that no promotional program could have manufactured. Half a century on, the name still means something at strips and shows across the country, and this clip is the single best argument for why.
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DumbAss!
Awesome car to watch in it’s day.
Can’t handle the power, don’t get in it
It was driven by the guy who has ALWAYS driven it. Jay was a passenger !
Robert Amatangelo
Could happen to anybody. Don’t fool yourself – these things go sideways more often than you think.
I wouldn’t drive a car like that if I was u it’s the driver idiot I been racing 35 years 2100hp never happened to me 80 years old casket time
Especially with all the weight in the back, car was not made to turn
Muscle Car Fan Grumpy Jenkins figured that out. His cars had steerable wheelie bars.
I remember seeing this in person years ago ..
Sox & Martin has faster ET
Totally different car with a rear mounted engine, built for wheel standing. Not drag racing !
Oh well, and?
This car was a piece of history, and the “dumbass” as you call him has driven it for many years. The problem was there wasn’t enough room left when the car came down again onto four wheels, and he had to turn sharply causing the car to barrel roll.