BUYING GUIDE
As an XJ-S convertible makes £131,000 at auction, could it be time to grab an early one before prices take off? We guide you through the pre-facelift XJ-S.
BEFORE TAKING to the helm of Jaguar World, I spent many years working on the company’s general classic car titles and during that time one central theme was not, as you might expect, that of a world stuck in the past but one of constant change. As interest tails off in the tricky-to-own prewar cars, it’s balanced out by younger models entering the scene when they make the transition from used car to modern classic and finally to fully fledged classic.
One perfect illustration of this is the Jaguar XJ-S, a car which it’s generally accepted was misunderstood when new and for many years was struggling to find its place in the world until it finally blossomed late in life.
As a classic its fortunes were similarly rocky as E-Type values soared, but the sale of an 1989 XJ-S convertible last month for a staggering £131,000 by Silverstone Auctions means it has well and truly arrived on the classic scene. In purely technical terms it’s also a superior car to the E-Type and far more practical as an ownership proposition... at least, if you buy the right one.
Here then is what you need to know if you’re in the market for a ‘classic’ XJ-S, by which we mean the cars produced prior to the 1991 facelift which saw both the styling and badging changed.
HISTORY
Jaguar had been working on a replacement for the E-Type since the mid-1960s, but with the development of the XJ saloon the priority for both resources and budgets, progress was slow. Design studies were worked up as early as 1967, following a brief to use the newly-developed V12 engine and also a proposed V8, but the merger with British Leyland in 1968 saw Triumph become the group’s designated maker of small sports cars, the result being the alluring but flawed Stag, while instead of being replaced, the E-Type morphed into the Series 3.
Meanwhile, Jaguar stylist Oliver Winterbottom, overseen by Malcolm Sayer, began work on a larger car, a grand tourer based on the platform of the XJ under project name XJ27. Rather than looking back towards the E-Type era, Sayer’s proposal was to create a modern-looking car in the Italian style, low and wide. Both Sayer and Winterbottom produced proposals for the car, with Sayer’s using pop-up lamps and a Jensen-style glass hatch, while Winterbottom had gone for a fastback style.
It was Sayer’s design which provided the essential basis of the production car, but his untimely death in 1970 and Winterbottom’s departure for Lotus the following year meant that it would be left to the rest of the team to finish off the details. The glass hatch had already been questioned on engineering grounds owing to its complexity and before Sayer’s passing had bee
