CLASSIC DRIVE
We go back in time to sample a car you couldn’t officially buy but which could so easily have been built
IT’S THE spring of 1976 and in a British Leyland dealer a customer is giving the Jaguar Daimler salesman a hard time: clearly a man of considerable means, he knows very much what he wants and he intends to get it.
What he wants is a two-door coupe, with the elegant pillarless style then in vogue, a prestige badge, enough power to set it apart from the run-of-the-mill Granadas and Mantas... and a manual gearbox. As his stringback gloves testify, this is someone who likes to be in control and for him a lazy three-speed self-shifter just won’t cut it.
Sweating under the showroom lights as the weather already warms up for that year’s legendarily hot summer, our hapless BL chap tries to explain that yes, he would be delighted to supply a Jaguar coupe and with a V12 badge on the boot, nobody would dare to question his muscle, horsepower or financial. But the manual shift? Sorry sir, it’s just not an option.
Not a man to take no for an answer – after all, compromising wasn’t how he got to the point where he had the price of a nice house to spend on a car – our demanding customer presses the point. Not so gently he mentions the 3.0 CSi in the BMW showroom down the road and of course the Mercedes dealer in the next town has already hinted at a W123 coupe on the horizon... at which point there’s a mumbled promise to make some enquiries and see what can be done.
Behind the scenes a frantic call or two is made to Browns Lane and the request eventually lands at the door of the fledgling SVO operation – or at least the enthusiastic skunkworks department which would eventually become SVO.
Naturally, the combination of manual gearbox and V12 is in fact a straightforward conversion, since both the Series 3 E-Type and a handful of early examples of the XJ-S were offered in manual form. In short order a parts list is assembled, the job is costed and a delighted customer makes an order. To add some icing to the commission cake, the coupe is ordered in the unusual Daimler Double Six trim, allowing an equally delighted salesman to book a week in Spain to escape the sweaty BL showroom.
Did this really happen? Who knows, it may well have done but officially the V12 coupes were only ever offered in automatic form and as yet nobody has stumbled upon a factory-produced manual.
It doesn’t mean it wasn’t considered though, which is what intrigued Simon Currell, the owner of the car you see here. What if, he thought, British Leyland’s proposed return to the European Touring Car championship for 1977 with the XJ12 coupe had required Jaguar to build a number of manual cars in 1976 for homologation purposes? What would the result be like as a road car and what if some of them h
