Comedian Jay Leno is well-known for two things: One is the first word of this sentence, and the other is his extensive classic car and motorcycle collection. As an enthusiast with the money to back it up, he’s stoked his passions for both things for decades. In November, 2022, his car collection made news in an unfortunate way, when he sustained second-degree burns while repairing a fuel line on one of his antique cars.
Now that it’s January, 2023, it seems that he’s had another spate of bad luck with one of his vintage vehicles—and this time, it was a motorcycle. Since it’s Leno, of course, it’s not just any old motorcycle. As the story goes, on January 17, 2023, he was out road testing an unspecified 1940 Indian when he noticed the distinct scent of a gas leak.
“So, I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it,” Leno said. “So, you know, I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clotheslined me and, boom, knocked me off the bike,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The 72-year-old comedian offered this piece of information in an interview about an upcoming date on the Las Vegas Strip in March, 2023. While his description of the crash doesn’t sound super-serious, the injuries he sustained put a different light on it: one broken collarbone, two broken ribs, two fractured kneecaps. Ouch.
Still, despite this recent run of bad luck, he says that he’ll be performing his comedy act this weekend. He joked that he didn’t want to bring up this second vintage vehicle injury at first, because one bad run with a vintage vehicle is sad, but two starts to look like it’s something about you that’s the problem.
You can read the whole interview over at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. While it’s not at all clear that the 1940 Indian involved was specifically the one shown in this video, it’s still fun to watch it in action, especially with the sidecar.
