What does Jaguar mean to you?
What one person may appreciate Jaguar for could be very different for another – as Craig finds out...
DESPITE NO LONGER being able to cling on to the wreckage and deny the approach of being ‘middle-aged’, I still try to do things that are better suited to young people.
One of those is playing rugby, which I still do most weekends throughout the winter, and from which I enjoy a lot of both physical and mental release. I also end up meeting a lot of people who are younger than me, as you might expect.
It was one of these youngsters who I engaged in a chat about Jaguars with the other week. He was playing for the opposing team and, as is the way in rugby, we all socialised for a bit after the game. I’d noticed him taking his kit bag out to the car park and putting it in the boot of a scruffy but straight-looking 1999 XK8 in the car park – quite an unusual choice of car for a young lad.
So, I quizzed him on it. It runs out that Ed, for that was his name, had grown up in a Jaguar family and that he’d wanted an XK8 since he first saw one as a toddler. I found this alarming in itself, as I was at university when the X100 XK was introduced and, by definition, was old enough to be his dad.
On which note, while Ed was growing up, his own dad had driven a series of Jaguars as company cars. Several X-TYPEs, an S-TYPE and more recently a few XFs and two F-PACEs. But it was the sports cars that both he and his dad always aspired to, to the extent that his father bought him the XK8 as a restoration project for his 21st birthday and they spent the next couple of years making it roadworthy together, as a companion to his dad’s XKR.
From a love of Jaguars, then, the two of us had something in common, but from a very different perspective. In my impressionable years it was the Jaguar saloon cars that were my childhood aspiration. My dad could never afford one, but our next-door neighbour had several – I remember Series 2 and 3 XJs on his drive and then, in 1988 when I was 10, a gleaming red XJ40 that our neighbour had bought as a retirement present to himself - E500 YRJ: I still remember the reg 36 years on!
I bought my first Jaguar – a red XJ40, funnily enough – when I was 24. I’ve not been without one for the 22 years that have passed since and things reached their zenith in 2022 when I bought my X308 XJ8 4.0 Sovereign. It’s quite simply the loveliest Jaguar I’ve ever owned, and
