Jay Leno Gets Ride At Daytona! - Watch Video

January 2002 (Newstream) -- As NASCAR gets ready to kick off it's 2002 season at the Daytona 500 -- pace car driver Jay Leno asked last year's NASCAR Championship runner-up Tony Stewart to give him a few pointers about the famous two and a half mile super speedway.

JAY: "OK, what do we do?"

TONY: "Put it into first gear and let the clutch out really slow."

JAY: "Let the clutch out real slow..." (peel out & bad shift)

TONY: "We'll work on shifting later."

TONY: "All right let's just stay in the middle of the race track here. Stay away from the large white concrete thing on the right."

JAY: "Stay away from the large white concrete thing!"

TONY: "I've never been nervous on this track until right now... Nice gentle entry into the corner."

JAY: "Just like PlayStation II. Right Tony? Tony!"

After the run Team Pontiac's leading driver got to grade the Tonight Show host's performance in the 2002 Firebird Trans Am pace car.

"Not bad for a rookie, little more training he'll be ready for the racetrack," said Stewart. "I'm not sure he's ready for the Winston Cup yet, but he might be ready for the bush league."

Jay was still pretty pumped about his experience.

"Well it's all pretty special to me," said Leno. "Anytime your going a 140 and the cops aren't behind you, I think that's what you call a special time. I mean the thing I find amazing is that this is basically a streetcar, and at 140 miles per hour the windows aren't being sucked out, the tires aren't screeching going through the banking. When I was a kid and you'd read about the pace car, you know, it would have to be specially prepared and the pace car would have special suspension and springs, and everything just to be able to do this. And you realize that this is just a stock car that you can buy. That's pretty cool."

Pontiac is making just 2,000 of these Collector Edition Firebirds to celebrate the historic muscle car's final year of production.