MODIFIED
This one-off special might look like a pre-war racing car but it was made in the late 2010s and is based on the running gear of a 1959 XK150
IT’S HARD to know who or what to believe these days. If it’s not politicians covering their tracks then it’s emails pretending to be from the bank or fake Rolexes sold as real ones.
Then there’s this grey two-seater. Judging by its long, low, and rakish design, the car was clearly designed and built in the Thirties. But that’s a bigger mistruth than that £30 Submariner you bought on the beach last summer because not only was the car put together in the late 2010s but beneath that handsome body is the chassis and engine from an XK150. Although this means the car’s image is a huge lie, its performance is anything but.
The project started in 2017 when Max Szewczyk, an aluminium fabricator based in Ilford, East London, bought a 1959 XK150 3.4 fixed head coupe (chassis 824682) that he originally planned to transform into a stripped racer. But when he began taking the car apart he realised the body was in a worse condition than he thought. “It was a bit of filler car,” he tells me over the phone when I call his workshop. “When I dug into it, the body was beyond salvage.”
With replacements too expensive and Max saying he didn’t have the knowledge to make one himself from aluminium, he decided on anther route; he would reclothe the chassis in the style of a Thirties racer. “It’s a period of cars I like and have worked on a lot,” Max tells me. “It’s everything I know put into a single car.”
From Bentleys to Bugattis, he freely admits to being influenced by several different models, but one more than so than the others; a unique Model 40 Special Speedster built for Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, in 1934.
With no real plan, it was a case of trial and error until Max got the lines and proportions he was happy with. “I roughed out the basic shape but it changed a lot. I originally tried to use the original XK150 grille in the design but it didn’t work.” Max made all the panels himself, using the traditional English wheel to get the lines and shapes he wanted.
Although he tells me he was, “more concerned about how it looked than how it performed,” he still spent time improving the car’s performance. The 3.4- litre XK unit was retained but rebuilt with a modified cylinder head with breathing through special triple twin-choke Weber carburettors. To make the car more userfriendly, Max replaced the XK150’s original gearbox with a modern Toyota five-speed unit while the disc brakes and suspension were both beefed up.
Due to having to fit the Jaguar around customer projects, it took Max three years to complete his XK150 Special. Fully road legal, it’s now for sale through Sovereign Car Sales in Whitchurch, Hampshire, who i
