Jay Leno spotted in San Francisco driving an upside-down Camaro

The upside-down Camaro was used in a shoot for "Jay Leno's Garage in San Francisco. The upside-down Camaro was used in a shoot for "Jay Leno's Garage in San Francisco. Photo: Courtesy Jeffrey Bloch / Speedycop Photo: Courtesy Jeffrey Bloch / Speedycop Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close Jay Leno spotted in San Francisco driving an upside-down Camaro 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

The sight of a celebrity driving on the hills of San Francisco Sunday afternoon was upstaged only by the spectacle of what was being driven: namely, an orangeish, upside-down 1999 Camaro.

Jay Leno was in town this weekend shooting an episode of his TV show "Jay Leno's Garage" and taking a tour of the city in the odd-looking Camaro. Riding around with him was Jeff Bloch, a police sergeant in Washington D.C. who built the car.

"It's a $200, 1990 Ford Festiva with a '99 Camaro body mounted on it," Bloch said in an interview with SFGATE. There's not much more to it than that, but it's just a good visual gag and a bit of clever engineering to make the body come off for maintenance."

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Bloch, who goes by the moniker Speedycop, built the car in 2013 over the course of three weeks to take part in a 24 Hours of LeMons race, where cars that cost $500 or less are pitted against each other in a misfit race that thumbs its nose at at the overpowered, high-priced ways of other motor races.

Bloch, 45, and his Gang of Outlaws have built a number of other fun and visually confusing cars, 26 since 2009. Among its builds, the team has morphed an attack helicopter into a street-legal, road racing and amphibious car, a 1956 Cessna into a drivable piece of machinery, and even tilted a 1976 VolksWagen camper van onto its side and turned it into a moving vehicle.

The upside-down Camaro resides in Emeryville with the LeMons team, who now owns the running sight gag and loans it out for media appearances. According to Bloch, he and Leno drove the car around the Fairmount Hotel in Nob Hill a few times while shooting, before driving through the city and up to Twin Peaks.

Leno and the car attracted a lot of attention Sunday during the shoot.

"Some of the other cars that we've done that are street legal — like the plane that I still drive — it's a parade on wheels," Bloch said. "It's just a lot of fun, people want to take pictures of it and talk about it.

"Then get a recognizable celeb like Leno behind the wheel, people just freak out, so it was quite entertaining."

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The car also made some headlines earlier this year when racer Dave Montoya borrowed the car for an event and got a note from his homeowners association to move the car (to their untrained sensibilities, an eyesore) within 15 days. The group stated that Montoya was in violation of his agreement that parked cars must be used for personal transportation.

The car is entirely street-legal, actually, after some work with Alloy Motors to make the car compliant with California emissions laws, according to Jalopnik. The association was not-so-kindly told to mind its own business.

The episode featuring the Camaro in San Francisco is set to air in season four of "Jay Leno's Garage" in 2018.