HISTORY
Everybody reckoned they could do better than Jaguar when it came to styling a successor to the E-Type, but as it turned out, few could actually better the XJ-S
C ALLED ME awkward if you like,but I’ve never fully subscribed to the idea of William Lyons’ unerring talent for car styling and to my mind some of the best-looking Jaguars are those which weren’t the work of ‘the old man’ himself. Indeed, the early XJ-S is a perfect example and can’t even claim to be the work of one person since the production version ended up being the work of several people.
The project had kicked off with Malcolm Sayer as project leader, with young staff stylist Oliver Winterbottom providing styling support. The two had both produced concepts for an XJ-based sports 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, although the rejection of his glass hatch on engineering grounds had given the car its signature flying buttresses. His untimely death in 1970 however meant that it would be left to the rest of the team to finish off the details, but Winterbottom would also move to Lotus in 1971, meaning that the final production version of the XJ-S did have something of a ‘designed by committee’ background.
Yet despite this, it remained a striking car and in the context of its time, appeared dramatic and modern where the E-Type – even though it may be hard to believe today – was looking dated in both its detailing and proportions. Sayer’s original idea had been to create a car in the modern Italianate GT style, low and wide, which was something the XJ-S definitely achieved.
There’s always someone who thinks they can do better though and over the years we’ve seen several attempts to dramatically restyle the XJ-S, with varying degrees of success. Here we run through some of the most obvious candidates.
Lynx Eventer
Not so much restyled but entirely reimagined, the beauty of Lynx’s estate conversion was that it retained the detailing of the original car and wasn’t trying to be anything more than an extension of Jaguar’s original thinking.
The company had made its mark with D and C-Type replicas followed by a convertible conversion of the XJC which led logically to an open-top XJ-S, a decade before the factory full convertible arrived.
The knowledge gained in the creation of the Spyder came in handy when Lynx spotted a niche in the market for a sporting estate, although in many ways the estate conversion was more involved – it didn’t need the reinforcements to compensate for the loss of a steel roof but the work did involve relocating the fuel tank from above the axle to beneath the boot floor in order to allow a folding seat.
