COLLECTOR
We find one man who has made it his mission to save the original XJR from extinction
CAREFULUP there,” laughs Chris Mansell as I gingerly try the strength of the shipping container roof on which I’ve set up my camera tripod. “My Super V8’s in there!”
On the scale of comments you don’t expect to hear, that’s some way up there, but then it had already been an odd sort of day. At approximately dawn, I’d found myself doing a drop-off in a rainlashed Reading outside the festival of the same name, a hasty McMuffin breakfast grabbed a short while later before meeting a colleague from a train at Swindon station and then finding myself stationary on a flooded motorway as a violent downpour broke through the summer heat.
What really made me wonder if I’d stepped into a parallel universe though was finding myself just a few hours later chatting to a man who boasts not just one but four X300-generation XJRs on the premises. That’s in addition to the immaculate and very rare Daimler somewhere underneath me, a couple of XJ-S’s (one a rare Guy Salmon special) and a solitary X-Type.
“I think it got out of hand,” laughs Chris as we leather the cars off after another downpour, but as we chat cars in general and Jaguars in particular it becomes apparent that each of the XJRs is subtly different.
It may be an odd comment to make about a mass-produced object like a car, but it’s perhaps something which separates the Jaguars from the more clinical German competitors. After all, Ford ownership had allowed Jaguar to transform its production processes and drastically improve quality, but the Coventry maker remained a minnow in global automotive terms against the likes of BMW and Mercedes, meaning there was still a degree of human involvement in the assembly.
All of these cars were also produced long before the era of standard specification packs, meaning owners could still pick and choose from an options list of individual items which explains why confusion generally reigns over what is the ‘official’ standard specification for the XJR.
The first XJR to enter Chris’s life was the blue car registered N4 XJR at the back of our shots, which was bought back in 2010 after one of those familiar late-night online auction searches. After that crucial one more drink, Chris pushed the button and won the car at £2500. He’d been on the hunt for an XJR having been brought up with Jaguars but also having previously worked as a chauffeur in 1995 for a company using the then newly-launched XJR.
Initially the car saw regular use, but it’s been sidelined for a few years after Chris developed something of a sentimental attachment to it. “The plan was to treat it to a respray,” he explains. “But other projects got in the way...”
One of which would be the green
