JAGUAR XK120 CELEBRATED
The XK120 entered into legend the moment it was unveiled at Earls Court in 1948. It began to conquer the race tracks of the world and bagging speed records just a year later – and how!
The Jaguar XK Open Two- Seater Super Sports caused a seismic impact when it was unveiled at the 1948 British International Motor Show. The world’s media was sent into a tailspin, but marque founder, William Lyons, didn't foresee the car having a future; the swiftly re-named XK120 was a rolling laboratory – a test bed – after all. It wasn’t intended for volume production but demand for Jaguar's brave new world was such that the coachbuilt approach soon became untenable. Hand-beaten aluminium bodies made way for pressed-steel items with aluminium doors, bonnet and boot-lid skin after the factory’ initial 239 cars had been completed.
Demand outstripped supply by a significant margin even then. The XK120 was that rarest of things – a bargain. Priced at £998, there was nothing remotely as fast for the money – not even close. The new Jag was powered by an all-alloy twin-cam straight-six engine and the ‘120’ part of the nomenclature was there to signify its top speed in miles per hour. The same outlay would have bought you a Lea-Francis 14hp Sports, which, for all its virtues, somehow didn’t have quite the same allure.
Arbiters of beauty routinely cite the XK120 as being one of the greatest feats of automotive artistry ever perpetrated, but the outline wasn’t entirely original. Certainly, Lyons had a great eye for line and proportion but his real talent was his ability to appropriate the bits that he liked from other cars and refine them and this magpie approach is all-too obvious with the XK120. The car’s silhouette bore than a passing resemblance to the Carrozzeria Touring-bodied BMW 328s that won the Mille Miglia in 1940 though it was far prettier.
RACING IMPROVES THE BREED
Aside from its fabulous styling, the XK120 (‘X’ for ‘experimental’, ‘K’ the sequence of engine design designation) also excelled in motor racing, and not just at home. Lyons' creations had enjoyed competition success before – witness Jack Harrop's victories with the SS100 on the 1937 and 1938 RAC Rally of Great Britain events – but the breadth of the XK's achievement far outstripped even that of pure-bred racing exotica despite not being conceived with competition in mind. Inevitably a number of aluminium-bodied examples found their way into motor sport, with the likes of Leslie Johnson, Peter Walker, Clemente Biondetti, Tommy Wisdom and Ian Appleyard among its early adopters.
The latter – Lyons’ son-in-law – in particular heaped glory
